After the jump for 1×12 Spoilers
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Jenny said she would tell the story once, and never again, as the show flashed back to Jack’s rape attempt, an intentionally unsettling moment in the drama, which cast and crew took very seriously.
“We had a lot of rehearsal, and there was a closed set and really, the thing that makes that kind of scene is the attitude that surrounds it from everybody that’s involved and it was dealt with really sensitively,” Laura, who plays Jenny, told Access Hollywood. “Everybody wanted to make sure that there was just enough of it shown on screen that did the story justice, but that nothing was gratuitous and too over the top, and so we did a lot of rehearsal to make sure that it was very finally tuned.
“With scenes like that, it’s not the kind of thing that you can just go and improvise, for many different reasons, one in particular being safety. There’s violence in that scene and you have to make sure that you get that right and we had a wonderful director who wanted to make sure that the stories of the characters were told very clearly at the same time,” she continued. “So while it was tough in the way that doing anything like that is, because you put yourself somewhere both physically and emotionally quite vulnerable, at the same time, it felt necessary and it felt like it was being handled really well and really sensitively and so I was comfortable.”
In the drama, Jack Randall hit and smacked Jenny Fraser, but she managed to defend herself from the sexual assault by finding his weakness. She stopped him from being able to go any further by laughing at him.
“She kind of stumbles on this… frailty of [Jack], that in the face of humor, he’s sort of — he is defenseless,” Tobias said of the turning point in the scene. “But we were also keen to make it sort of — it seems a bit sort of sadomasochistic almost… the sort of multiple strikes at her.”
Jamie (Sam Heughan) had a story to tell of his own (to Claire) about what happened when he was in the hands of the Redcoats at Fort William, in between his first and second flogging. Dragged into Black Jack’s office (in the Jamie flashback), the villain made Jamie an offer. “It’s quite simple. Give over to me. Make free of your body and there will be no second flogging,” Jack said.
Did Jack actually mean it?
“I think he probably did, but again I feel like that’s sort of early on, before he really starts to understand who Jamie is and so that feels more kind of standard procedure for Jack, maybe,” Tobias said. “I was always kind of negotiating with the writers about the extent to which – ’cause I guess there’s a sort of divided opinion on what Jack’s sexuality is and… I suppose what the obsession [is] with Jamie, whether it is purely sexual. And I was always more keen to make it not just about sex, that it was more about sadism and about sort of finding — breaking someone down, and that sex was a tool rather than the end point on that. … But that scene is definitely more in the camp of using his position to sexual ends.”
Read the full article at the source here.
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