‘Outlander’ Series Finale: Caitriona Balfe, Sam Heughan and EP on Celebrating the Final Sex Scene, That Callback to the Pilot and What the Ending Means: ‘That Door Was Never Going to Be Closed’

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for “And the World Was All Around Us,” the series finale of “Outlander,” now streaming on Starz.

Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan don’t know what to make of that final shot of the “Outlander.” But they know what they were feeling in the moment as they filmed it nearly two years ago.

“We were both like, ‘Can we just stay dead?’” Heughan tells Variety. “Can we just take our nice break?”

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This draws laughs from both of them, sitting together the day before the May 15 series finale — but they aren’t kidding. As they filmed the scene, when Claire lies down beside Jamie’s dead body, and possibly dies herself, neither one of them wanted to adhere to the script, which directed  them to open their eyes and gasp for breath as the series cuts to black. “Outlander” showrunner Matthew B. Roberts leaves it up to the audience what this possible resurrection might mean. But Balfe and Heughan wanted to stay dead.

“We played chicken about who would open their eyes first, and who wouldn’t,” Balfe says. “I was like, ‘I’m not opening my eyes. Are you going to open your eyes?’”

In all fairness, their resistance to the tragic scene will pale in comparison to that of the fans who have spent the entirety of Season 8 –– and really, the nearly 12 years leading up to it –– fearing that the couple wouldn’t get their happy ending. This season only further cast that into doubt when it began with Claire and Jamie being given a book written by her first husband Frank (Tobias Menzies) in the 20th century declaring that Jamie will die at the Battle of Kings Mountain. The foreboding prediction closely follows author Diana Gabaldon’s ninth book, “Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone,” but it still loomed over the entire season. In the book, Jamie is shot, but Claire manages to save him, seemingly with an assist from her long-teased “blue light” healing abilities.

The jolt of life at the end of the TV series suggests a similar ending, given that the final shot shows Claire’s hair has turned gray overnight as she cradled his body and now lays lifeless next to  it. But it’s fans who will have to chew on what they think it means, and whether what they are seeing is real or one last dose of magic before the series signs off.

“I guess it’s up to interpretation, but are they now somewhere else?” Heughan asks. “Maybe they’re in a different realm. There’s definitely something eternal about these two.” 

“Metaphysical, even,” Balfe adds.

Roberts knows exactly what happened. Does he want to share that with the class? “No, I do not,” he says with a sly grin. 

After more than a decade, Roberts doesn’t want to tell fans how to feel about the finale. “If I say definitively, ‘This is what you should take from it,’ then I think that diminishes your experience. I don’t want to do that to the fans. They’ve earned their right to make up their own minds about what that is.”

He does, however, confirm multiple versions of the finale existed. Most were red herrings in case scripts got leaked, or call sheets were made public. But they did film variations on the final scene as well. 

“In the shooting of it, there were multiple options within what we filmed,” Roberts says, again not revealing much in the way of detail. “I think that’s why, even if you were working on the show, you could go, ‘I don’t know how it ends. I have not seen anything.’ Because you could do a lot of things with that ending.”

As for those fake script endings, he did say it was made with at least a little knowledge of what’s to come in Gabaldon’s 10th and final book in the series, “A Blessing for a Warrior Going Out.” 

“Diana gave me a little brief on where she was going in Book 10, and so one of them, if it got out, would have fit really well into that [story],” he says. “There were a couple others that if we had the time and the space, it would have been cool to kind of investigate those too.”

Regardless of how the ending is interpreted, Balfe and Heughan both agree it was not easy to film. Not only because it was emotional –– that was a given –– but because they didn’t know how to piece this moment into the story of two characters they’ve spent 12 years constructing individually, and as a partnership.

“I’ll speak for myself, but it was hard to understand what that moment actually was,” Balfe says. “You want it to have meaning, and you want it to be impactful and powerful. It just felt very vital that we got it right. But there were certain things that were being rewritten that would have happened prior to it, and for me, as an actor anyway, I didn’t feel like I was in those moments with the entirety of the information of my character. So it was the toughest to film. But as always, as actors, we think we’re creating our own linear story, and then you realize when you’re in an editing suite that all that goes out the window anyway. So you just have to trust that Matt will make the decisions that he wants, and, you know, he did.”

“I couldn’t tell you what the ending means,” Heughan adds. “But I felt once I died, my job was done.”

Again, that draws laughs from both of them. “Yeah, Sam is like, ‘I’m just lyin’ on a rock now!’”

Heughan, for his part, was more interested in filming a scene that pays off a mysterious moment all the way back in the pilot episode (and in Gabaldon’s original 1991 book), which involved a Scottish man standing in the rain outside of Claire’s hotel in 1946, watching her comb her hair. The man disappears before his face can be seen, but fans have long speculated it was Jamie. The finale confirms it, and the scene was one of the first Heughan shot in Season 8.

“I was really excited about it and I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to do it because I’m too old now, but they did a great job,” he says. “Putting the Season 1 costume back on was really cool, and I had no idea how it would look.”

“It looks great,” Balfe assures him.

Heughan does have some theories as to why and how Jamie appears in the 20th century. “I like to think it’s when he’s younger, perhaps he’s just come back from France, and he’s found himself here [outside her window],” he says. “There’s just something about that place, and he’s a superstitious guy. He doesn’t have the ability to travel or anything, but he knows this place is very special and holy. He goes there and he’s looking for something and I think he finds it.”

However, the scene goes a bit longer than fans probably expected, following Jamie from the second he disappears to where he goes next –– the stone circle at Craigh na Dun. For a moment, he touches the stone and it seems like the show is about to say he is a time traveler after years of claiming he wasn’t. But he doesn’t pass through them. Instead, when he leaves, the blue flowers that Claire originally went to the stones to pick in Season 1 magically sprout in his wake. Earlier in the episode, he had asked her on their last morning at Fraser’s Ridge if she ever regretted her hunt for those flowers that brought her to the stones, and she says no because it gave her everything she ever wanted. Is this Jamie leaving them for her as an invitation to come find him in time?

“Whether he’s a ghost or whether it is that younger version of himself, perhaps he’s calling Claire to himself somehow,” Heughan says.

Throughout the episode, fans get more scenes between Jamie and Claire than they’ve gotten in some time. It rectified something Balfe and Heughan say has been missing.

“It is definitely fitting,” she says. “I think this season, we didn’t spend that much time together. But in this story, Jamie and Claire have been the heart of it since the beginning, so it felt right.”

“I think it’s something that we may have lost a bit of, which we probably should have more of, and that is Jamie and Claire together throughout the last couple of seasons,” Heughan says.

“But those scenes in the finale were classic ‘Outlander,’ weren’t they?” she says, nodding in agreement with him.

Among those moments together is the final sex scene the two characters share. Over the course of its history, the series has made headlines for its frank embrace of sexuality. As executive producers, Balfe and Heughan have been outspoken about their role in not only making those scenes relevant and necessary to the story, but also their work with an intimacy coordinator starting in Season 6. It has been such a big part of their journey together as actors that they toasted the end.

“We’ve got some great photos of us celebrating the last intimate scene together,” he says. “We’ve got a glass of Champagne and everything!” 

Balfe says they remained committed to ensuring the scene was important to the connection the Frasers shared on what is likely to be their last night together — or not, depending on how you read the final shot.

“They’ve always communicated through their physicality as well as everything else, and the thing that we’ve always tried to do and fought for is that it makes sense to the storyline, that it feels genuine to who they are and where they’re at in the relationship at this point,” Balfe says “This scene felt like such a tender moment, and it was beautiful. It was very intimate and it was not about sex. It’s about holding each other and being close and connecting, and it did feel like that was important at the end.”

But ultimately, what should fans take from the moving yet sorrowful final chapter, which is punctuated with a glimmer of hope and possibly the breath of life for its central characters? Is the door really closed on returning to “Outlander” in the future?

“Well, that door was never going to be closed, I’ll tell you that,” Roberts says.