Tobias Menzies reacts to Sam Heughan remarks about shocking Outlander scene: ‘That’s sad to hear’

Tobias Menzies has responded to his Outlander co-star Sam Heughan’s remarks about filming a “harrowing” part of the series.

In a scene on the time-travel show, Heughan’s character Jamie Frazier is raped by Menzies’s Black Jack Randall in a prison.

In his 2022 memoir, Heughan called the experience of shooting the story “harrowing” and “exhausting”. He revealed it had prompted him, as a producer on the show, to hire an intimacy coordinator.

He wrote that he didn’t feel it was necessary to be naked for the scenes, and felt that it sexualised a horrific moment. Heughan and the creative team eventually agreed to show his character nude only in the aftermath of the assault, leaving the explicit shots “on the cutting room floor.”

In an interview with The Independent, the Emmy Award-winning actor appeared taken aback by the comments.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard that, that’s sad to hear,” he said.

“My feeling about what we shot was that it didn’t feel decorative – it felt earned by what was going on in the drama. I felt that we showed something very, very unpleasant, and honest.

“It is shocking and certainly we went quite dark with it, but that felt like a way of avoiding the accusations of it being sexualised and titillating. We just made it very, very brutal, which is what that is.”

He said that what happened in the prison scene was the “fundamental wound” that so many of the show’s stories unfolded from. “Whether we could have done that by allusion or by reference, that’s a question that was above my paygrade at that time.”

Time-travel show Outlander, meanwhile, had Menzies playing the dual roles of a historian and his callous ancestor for the first three seasons.

The Highlands-set drama, now in its seventh season, is massively popular around the world, but Menzies notes that it hasn’t “really meaningfully landed in this country”.

He thinks this might be because “there’s a slightly romantic aspect of the Scottish history-ness of it, where maybe Brits are like, ‘Hey, don’t tell us about that,’ because it’s written by an American”.

Menzies, who played Prince Philip in seasons three and four of the hit Netflix show, The Crown, has previously suggested that viewers who thought the show was an accurate portrayal of royal history were “naive”.

The actor said the series “was always headed on a bit of a collision course” as it began to dramatise royal events in recent memory.

Rape Crisis offers support for those affected by rape and sexual abuse. You can call them on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, and 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland, or visit their website at www.rapecrisis.org.uk. If you are in the US, you can call Rainn on 800-656-HOPE (4673)