‘Outlander’ stars talk filming ‘bittersweet,’ ’emotional’ final season

March 6, 2026

Sophie Skelton as Brianna MacKenzie, Richard Rankin as Roger MacKenzie, Caitriona Balfe as Claire Fraser and Sam Heughan as Jamie Fraser in ‘Outlander.’ (Starz)

The time has come to say goodbye to the time travel romance Outlander. The series’ eighth and final season premieres on Starz Friday.

It promises to be an emotional conclusion to the Fraser family’s story, which began with Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire’s (Caitriona Balfe) years-spanning love story and expanded to include their daughter, Brianna (Sophie Skelton), and her husband, Roger (Richard Rankin).

The first couple of episodes are a family reunion of sorts with the characters coming back together after some time apart. Skelton says “every scene had a bittersweet feeling” as members of the show’s large cast began to wrap.

“It was almost like death by a thousand cuts really,” Rankin adds. “You had one person wrap one day, then the next day, and then the next day. And people did get quite emotional.”

Multiple endings for the series were shot, and while Rankin says he knows which one was chosen, Skelton says she’s still in the dark.

“I actually, I’m kind of intrigued to see it with the fans,” she says. “I actually haven’t even asked, so I don’t know. Yeah, I’m in it with you guys.”

While the end is near, Skelton and Rankin both say if they could time travel to relive any moment on set, they’d go back to the beginning.

“Maybe my first day, I feel,” Skelton, who joined the show in season 2, says. “It might be cool to go back and just, I don’t know, relive what I was thinking. … It’d be fun to go back now with the knowledge I’ve got and just be like, ‘Mate, just go for it. Do something rogue with Brianna.’”

Rankin agrees, adding that he was “perhaps a little shy” when he first started and would go back to “just maybe have a little word with myself and, you know, maybe be a bit bolder.”