Blood

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Birthright,” Episode 6  of “Outlander: Blood of My Blood,” now streaming on Starz.

“Outlander” has always been a baptism by fire kind of experience for its actors. More than a decade into the franchise, the sweeping romanticism of author Diana Gabaldon’s story is matched only by a constantly evolving definition of trauma, leaving each character –– and the audience –– to brace for the brutality of life and whatever fresh hell awaits them around every corner.

Julia (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine) rounded that proverbial corner in the sixth episode of Starz’s prequel series “Outlander: Blood of My Blood.” In the span of the hour, Corfield gives birth not once but twice on screen, while Irvine plays out Henry’s mental collapse in real time. But before you worry too much for the actors, being handed that defining traumatic moment to chew on is kind of a rite of passage in the world of “Outlander.”

“I think that’s the thing with the show,” Irvine tells Variety. “It’s an epic, epic story, and everyone will have their time, I’m sure.”

Rite of passage or not, it was still a heavy lift for Corfield to perform two birthing scenes back to back, an experience she’s kind of hazy on more than a year later.

“I think it was a week of birthing, actually,” Corfield says of how the scenes were filmed. “If I’m remembering correctly, I think that was why it was so intense because I realized I was doing a whole week of this. [For the main birthing scene], we were in that room filming for three or four days.”

Since inadvertently time traveling back to 1714 Scotland, Julia and Henry have endured enormous hurdles to survive as people out of time. She has been forced into servitude in the home of the cruel, relentless Lord Lovat (Tony Curran), whom she slept with to cover up that she is carrying Henry’s baby. She feared Lovat would get rid of the baby if it wasn’t his, and a seer prophecy that the child will grow up to be king has now made her even more valuable to him. Henry, meanwhile, has been conscripted as an accountant for Isaac Grant (Brian McCardie), a treacherous position that promises the opportunity to search for Julia if only he can navigate the politics of the time.

Julia’s tenuous circumstances at Castle Leathers reach a breaking point in Episode 6 when she goes into labor, leading to a frenzied birthing scene where she is assisted and then berated by a gaggle of howdies (Scottish midwives) who come to support her until her fellow housemaid Davina (Sarah Vickers) begins to question the legitimacy of the pregnancy. When she claims Julia seduced Lovat, the howdies become venomous, leaving the expectant mother writhing on the straw-strewn floor to defend the paternity between contractions. She’s lying, of course. Henry is the father. But in this moment, she vehemently stands her ground as if it were the truth because for her baby to survive, it has to be.

“I think she must die a little bit inside every time she has to lie and say Lovat is the father,” Corfield says.

The actor says she loaded up on energy drinks to get multiple days of shooting the birth, much of which required her to fend off the threats of the howdies and a furious Davina.

“I wanted to map out the intensity of the contractions, as well as the intensity of the women for this moment because it kind of goes hand in hand,” she says. “They both get more and more wild as the scene goes on. But the main thing for Julia is she is just in absolute animal instinct mode. She’s purely trying to protect this child, and that’s her only intention. The howdies were having to grab onto me and I was being sort of manhandled all day every day. So it was really quite easy to do, because I didn’t have to pretend to be exhausted. I was absolutely exhausted fighting for my life!”

This scene is intercut with a comparatively calm flashback to when Julia gave birth to Claire (the character played by Caitriona Balfe in the flagship series). Then, she was standing in a crouched position, grabbing onto the metal bars of her and Henry’s bed in their flat back in London. Meanwhile, he’s fumbling around trying to find something to comfort her in an impossibly uncomfortable moment. It’s become an increasingly rare sight, seeing these two together and happy. 

“There’s an elation there, and it feels like young love epitomized,” Corfield says. “It’s in total opposition to what we see in the other scene, which felt like a totally different experience. In the castle, she’s on her knees a lot. She’s crawling around. [The howdies] are circling her. She tends to be sort of below all of them for quite a lot of it, and there’s that sensation of them closing in on her.”

Throughout the writhing and the screaming, Julia’s fortitude wears down a defiant Davina, whose history with Lovat feeds the moment. Further flashbacks show when Davina was first raped by Lovat and the resulting birth of her own son, Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy), aka the father of Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan). If you’re counting at home, that’s the third birthing scene in this one episode. But it’s revealed she also rejected the howdies’ scorn for how she got pregnant, just as Julia is doing now. Davina eventually casts out the howdies on Julia’s behalf, and even banishes Lovat when he barges in with a priest trying to marry Julia before the baby is born so it won’t arrive out of wedlock — something that will likely come at her own peril.

“It’s a really lovely moment, because Julia appeals to Davina as a mother,” Corfield says. “She’s saying that the way you shaped your son is down to you. Please let me shape my son. Don’t let me die, and don’t leave me in the hands of Lovat. At that moment, they become a team.”

The impact these three births have on the “Outlander” canon is massive. Fans will undoubtedly be thrilled to see the literal origins of Claire and Brian, both of whom are essential for bringing the original series story to pass. But it’s the new as-yet-named baby boy who remains a question mark. Gabaldon has always told fans Claire’s parents died when she was five years old, making their survival in the past and the arrival of her little brother a new wrinkle in the story. Let the wild theorizing of who he will grow up to be commence!

As for the boy’s father, Henry does not get to share in the joy of his son’s birth. His desperate search to find Julia has angered his boss Grant, who concocts a plan to end the perceived distraction once and for all by paying a local midwife to tell the poor guy that his wife died in childbirth nearby. The sudden loss of his anchor and purpose completely shatters Henry’s fragile grip on reality, triggering a PTSD-induced episode in which he runs off screaming and dry heaving –– he has that in common with Julia’s storyline. Then, all of a sudden, a switch is flipped, and he retracts back to a joyous memory of racing home to tell Julia that WWI was over. The creatively shot scene shows him running through the Scottish woods as vestiges of the 20th century dot his path, cementing his break with reality.

“It’s something I put a lot of thought into,” Irvine says. “We’ve seen why they’re in love when we’ve seen them together. We’ve seen how happy it makes them. So now we need to see that Henry cannot face the facts. When she dies, he dies. We need to see that visceral reaction, and how unsettling would it be to see him have this mental breakdown with the absolute limits of despair and grief, and then that turns into elation and laughter? I thought that would be quite unsettling to watch. This is someone who is incredibly damaged, and who might be so broken at this point that we’re not sure what he’s going to do next.”

Audiences at least know where he’s headed in the immediate future as he runs off into his 1910s fantasy world. While Henry thinks he’s falling into the arms of Julia in his memory, he actually races straight to a sex worker whose advances he’d denied –– until now. In the fog of his mental break, he believes she is Julia and has sex with her, adding yet another line item to the list of things the Beauchamps have to catch up on.

Corfield and Irvine are currently filming Season 2 of the series in Scotland, so they are bound to secrecy on what’s to come. But they both agree this is the moment that will make or break their once-happy couple. “It’s kind of putting unconditional love to the test, I suppose,” he says.

Julia has been with Lovat out of pure survival instincts, so Henry isn’t the only one in bed with another. But Corfield admits this particular twist is different.

“It’s a hard pill to swallow for me and for Julia,” she says. “I was heartbroken when I read it. Their love is so deep, but that’s not to say that something like this would be easily forgotten. It’s something they will definitely have to talk through when they meet again.”