- During the Outlander: Blood of My Blood panel at Comic-Con, star Harriet Slater compared her character’s first meeting with love interest Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy) to a scene from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.
- The prequel series has two pairs of star-crossed lovers — Brian and Ellen (Slater), who come from rival clans, and Julia (Hermione Corfield) and Henry (Jeremy Irvine), who are separated when they travel through time.
- Hopefully, they’ll reach happier endings than Shakespeare’s famous duo.
We’ve always known that Jamie Fraser’s parents didn’t have the easiest journey to happily-ever-after.
But as it turns out, their families are sworn enemies and the whole thing is very Romeo and Juliet. In an exclusive clip that debuted at the Outlander: Blood of My Blood panel at Comic-Con, Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy) and Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) meet in secret at a bridge in the Highlands.
When they tell each other their names, specifically that he is a Fraser and she is a MacKenzie, they realize just how massive the obstacles are to their potential romantic happiness. “That is unfortunate,” Ellen tells Brian when he confesses his parentage to her. “Tis,” he agrees.
“It’s very much a Romeo-and-Juliet situation they’ve got going on,” Slater teased at the panel. “This is the scene where we realized who we are because when we first meet, we have no idea. They just really fancy each other, and then they meet on the bridge and discover that they’re from rival clans, which is not good news.”
Still, just as with Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, it doesn’t matter by the time they figure it out. “It’s too late,” added Slater. “They’ve already fallen in love. It’s a bit awkward, isn’t it?”
Sanne Gault/Starz
Furthering the Romeo and Juliet connections, Slater also teased another scene — the actual first meeting between Brian and Ellen, where they exchange few words but spy each other through the slats of a barn and are immediately intrigued.
Slater noted that the scene’s set-up reminded her of an iconic scene in Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo + Juliet. “The very first time in the barn, it reminded us all a bit of the scene in Romeo + Juliet with the fish tank. That was my first thought when I read it. It’s such a beautiful scene.”
In Luhrmann’s 1996 film, Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Juliet (Claire Danes) first see each other with a fish tank between them. They’re immediately taken with each other, smiling as a tropical blue tang swims across their faces.
Thankfully, we at least know that Brian and Ellen will eventually reach a happier ending than Romeo and Juliet.
Jamie Roy, who plays Brian, was less taken with comparisons to Baz Luhrmann and more struck by his memories of filming the bridge scene. “Every time I see that, it just takes me back to actually filming that,” he told the crowd in Hall H. “In Scotland, the weather can have like four different seasons in one day. That was what happened with that scene.”
STARZ
“It started with rain and sleet,” he continued. “The sun came out for about 30 seconds, and it was overcast, and then, we finally got to film it. But my god, it was cold. It was so cold to the point where my face would just freeze up.”
On Outlander, inter-clan warfare took a backseat to the Highlanders’ efforts against the British, but Blood of My Blood takes us further into the past, where family rivalries dictated ones’ loyalties.
“They’re rival clans,” showrunner Matthew B. Roberts explained on the panel. “They want to be richer, they want to have more land, they want to have more tenants. The politics in this show are something that we get to do that we didn’t necessarily do on Outlander as much. The family dynamic is a very big deal as well. It’s not only rival clans, but it’s rivals within your own clan.”
Outlander: Blood of My Blood debuts its first two episodes Aug. 8 on Starz.
Check out more of EW’s coverage from San Diego Comic-Con 2025 here.
