‘Outlander’ Season 3: Sam Heughan Spills On Jamie And Claire’s Reunion

Warning: The article may contain Outlander Season 3 spoilers.

Outlander Season 3 won’t air until mid-2017, but fans of the Starz series have been treated to a slew of spoilers and cast interviews since production resumed on the time-traveling romantic drama in Scotland a few months ago.

Among them is a new PopSugar interview with Sam Heughan (Jamie), in which the hunky Scottish actor admitted that Outlander Season 3 will depart somewhat from the storyline author Diana Gabaldon wrote in Voyager, the third book in her popular Outlander book series.

“We always try to stick as close as we can to the books, but obviously it’s hard to make a book episodic. I think there is going to be stuff there that the fans will recognize since we put in as much detail as possible, but there’s some really incredible moments. Certainly, the beginning of Season 3 is a slight deviation from the book.”

And what might some of these deviations be?

“We’re going to be showing a bit of Culloden, and what happened to Jamie,” Heughan explained. “You’re going to see it, and I think it’s important since we talked about this battle, and that the Highlanders are doomed, and that they might be wiped out. It’s a reward for the fans. There’s one moment in particular that I didn’t even know we were going to shoot, and I know the crew didn’t, and everyone was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ There are some big surprises, but there are also some great moments from the book that we try to stick to as much as possible.”

Heughan also dropped some surprising new information about the way Jamie will be portrayed in Outlander Season 3. Apparently, the warrior’s time away from Claire (Caitriona Balfe) — who went back through the stones to her previous life in the 1940s at the end of Season 2 — will leave him very changed.

“In book three, Jamie is many characters. He’s at least three, maybe four different things to people. He has different names, and basically he doesn’t want to be Jamie Fraser. He wants to die at the end of Season 2, and he goes into battle thinking he will. To live is not part of the plan, and certainly without Claire, it’s even more so not what he was expecting. He has to learn to fight again and find purpose in his life.”

While it may be hard for the show’s fans to understand why Jamie is so quick to move on from Claire, Heughan reminds us that Jamie is in a dark frame of mind as Outlander Season 3 begins.

“In his mind, she’s dead,” he says. “She’s in the future living a different life, and she thinks he’s dead. They both create new lives without each other to try to survive and cope, so you can imagine that when they do finally reunite, it’s going to be quite special.”

Heughan provided even more spoilers about what viewers can expect to happen between Jamie and Claire in Outlander Season 3.

“Time has passed, they become different people, but they do have this great love for each other and this great bond. Ultimately, that’s their saving grace, and what brings them back together. They have so much history. It’s really wonderful to play these characters who have moved on from where they were in Season 1, but, hopefully, you’ll see bits of what attracted them to each other in the first place.”

And since Heughan was in such a giving mood, he even talked about his off-screen relationship with Balfe, with whom he has been consistently — and wrongly — romantically linked with. The two actors have not worked together much during the filming of Outlander Season 3, and the separation has taken a toll.

“Caitriona and I get on very well, and I’m very lucky,” Heughan said of his co-star. “She’s extremely talented and an extremely nice person, and we have a lot of fun. Actually, having scenes away from her, and time apart from her, is kind of like losing someone in your family, a loved one. It’s very strange, and I don’t enjoy it. Whenever we’re together, it feels right, and I look forward to the days when we get to work together again.”

What do you think of the latest Outlander Season 3 spoilers? Are you at all concerned that the series will deviate too far from the books?

Outlander Season 3 returns to Starz in 2017.

[Featured Image by Starz]