In his new memoir, titled ‘Waypoints: My Scottish Journey’, the actor reveals that he felt ‘betrayed’ after he’s pushed into filming a full-frontal nudity scene during the end of the Starz show’s first season.
AceShowbiz -“Outlander” star Sam Heughan slammed the Starz show’s creative team in his new memoir. In the book, titled “Waypoints: My Scottish Journey”, the actor reveals that he felt “betrayed” after he’s pushed into filming a full-frontal nudity scene during the end of the show’s first season.
Sam shares that he has agreed to nudity in his contract, but he doesn’t think this level of nudity is appropriate to the scene. “This wasn’t a moment where I felt that being naked would add to the horror of what Jamie undergoes in that castle dungeon as a form of punishment, subjugation and humiliation,” he writes in the book.
In the said scene, Sam’s character Jamie Faster is tortured and brutally raped by his nemesis Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies). It featured a full-frontal shot of his character following the rape.
“The cock shot was unnecessary and did betray my trust in the creative team a bit,” he explains. “We don’t need to see the horror to imagine what the characters go through. Imagination is way more powerful….”
Sam adds, “I pushed back, reasoning that nudity sexualized a horrific experience for my character, and it sparked quite a debate. Creative conversations are a feature of all productions, good art is made by questioning the truth and we all want to get it right.”
Eventually, the creative team compromised and agreed to only show Sam fully nude in the aftermath of the assault. Sam adds in his book, “Thankfully the nude shots ended on the cutting room floor. It was a harrowing, exhausting experience.”
The sexual assault scene was originated from Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling novels of the same name, which the series is based on. Showrunner Ron D. Moore previously talked about the scene in an interview with Vulture.
“We’re not playing around here,” the showrunner told the outlet back in 2015. “This is the story. There’s a book that we’re following, and this is part of the story that is absolutely necessary to that book. There’s really no way not to do it. This is a horrific situation, so it should be horrific.”
Sam, meanwhile, said that he felt duped into playing the grueling scene one more time at one point in the shoot. “They said, ‘We’d love one more wide shot of it, the whole thing.’ And I was like… [groans], ‘Oh God.’ I thought I’d gotten it all out of the way. And they said, ‘We’ll only do it up to a certain point, just before it happens,’ ” the actor recalled.
“It got up to that point, and they didn’t call ‘cut,’ so we had to carry on,” he explained. “I remember feeling so scared, and actually feeling slightly like my trust had been broken a bit because it was horrific. Great to play, but horrific.”
During his appearance on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast earlier this year, Sam revealed that the series now has an intimacy coordinator. “It’s important that everyone is protected, but also we find a way to explore these scenes and actually maybe get something more out of them,” he said at the time.
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