‘Outlander’ Stars Sam Heughan And Caitriona Balfe Tease Jamie And Claire’s Season 3 Reunion

The second season of Outlander ended with Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire’s (Caitriona Balfe) emotional farewell right before the Battle of Culloden.

With Claire travelling back to 1948 to be with her husband, Frank (Tobias Menzies), fans will have to wait for Season 3 to see her and Jamie together once more.

Fortunately, Heughan and Balfe sat down with Variety and opened up about Jamie and Claire’s Season 3 reunion and how the time apart will affect their relationship.

“There’s a lot of challenges to Season 3 – there’s a period of time where Jamie and Claire are apart; he thinks that he’s lost her, or at least that she’s alive and well but in the future, so what is he living for?” Heughan shared. “She will eventually return, but they’re both older, so what is Jamie, who is the man he’s become?”

Fans last saw Jamie preparing himself for the Battle of Culloden and sending Claire through the stones to protect her. Although Claire thought Jamie’s fate was to die at the battle, she later discovered that he survived the ordeal.

However, decades will have passed before they can come back together again.

“I think what’s going to be most exciting is the reunion between Claire and Jamie and them discovering each other again and falling in love all over again… I think both of them have probably held each other up on a pedestal for 20 years, so in many ways, they’re going to have to destroy that image first before they can fall in love with the person right in front of them, and that’s going to be really interesting.”

Speaking of spending 20 years apart, Vulture is reporting that both Jamie and Claire will have other lovers. For Claire, she spent the majority of that time with Frank, her first husband.

As far as Jamie is concerned, he enjoys the company of a few women in between his prison sentence at Ardsmuir Prison. Fortunately, none of his relationships last very long, meaning he’ll be freed up once Claire returns.

For Balfe, the complexity of her character’s relationship with Jamie is one of her favorite parts about Outlander.

“I love the complexity of that,” Balfe continued. “Because you can’t be in love with a ghost, and Claire is in many ways in love with Jamie’s ghost, as Jamie is in love with her ghost, and that’s not the people they are when they see each other again.”

The Season 2 finale of Outlander featured Claire 20 years down the road, with her daughter, Brianna, already entering adulthood. It isn’t clear how much the show will back track to account for the intervening years, but it won’t likely skip them all together.

“What I’m so excited about as well next season is we’ll see, hopefully, some of her progression as a mother,” Balfe shared. “So even though we’ve jumped forward in episode 13 [to see Claire] at 50, hopefully we’ll see some of that journey between late 20s and 50.”

Meanwhile, Fashion & Style is reporting that executive producer Ron Moore and his team have already started writing for the new season.

In an interview with Deadline, Moore revealed that the first couple of episodes have been written and the remainder of the season plotted out. Filming is expected to commence sometime in late August or early September.

The new season of Outlander is expected to air sometime in 2017.

[Photo by Laura Cavanaugh/Getty Images]