On Thursday (March 12) night, I took a position on a PaleyFest 2015 purple carpet for “Outlander,” a carpet on which questions had to occasionally be restated after being drowned out by squeals emanating from all corners of the Dolby Theater.
I'm not even sure the squeals were for, since stars Caitriona Balfe, Sam Heughan and Tobias Menzies, executive producer Ronald D. Moore and author Diana Gabaldon were all walking the carpet.
We were able to chat with all five of the available principals on the Starz time-traveling romance.
I talked about spanking with Gabaldon, the joys of playing evil with Menzies and with Heughan about the midseason return, which features a Jamie Fraser voiceover.
As carpet time gets brief, sometimes you only have a minute or two with talent and with Caitriona Balfe, we were told to take two questions.
I focused on the 2014 season's seventh episode, “The Wedding,” which has been hailed as a unique TV look at female sexuality, specifically the advantages of doing that kind of episode with women writing (Anna Kenney) and directing (Anna Foerster).
Balfe explained, “We didn't necessarily set out to make this female gaze type of sex scenes, but our source material is a female writer, we had a female director, we had a female writer for that episode and I think we all just wanted to make something that was very true to their relationship and real, as real as you can imagine people like that would have.”
Check out the brief conversation above.
“Outlander” returns to Starz on April 4.