Here is Ron D. Moore’s interview with Access Hollywood about the Outlander finale

From Access Hollywood:

Starz’s “Outlander” went to some unsettling and dark places in its Season 1 finale on Saturday night.

(Spoiler alert: This story contains major plot details from the show.)

Read more after the jump!

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Before things ended with the main characters on a ship to France, with the hope of being able to change the future, there were harrowing scenes of torture and male rape, perpetrated by Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies) on the show’s male protagonist, Highlander Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan). Based on the material in Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” book, the show tackled a subject not often seen on TV.

Executive Producer and showrunner Ronald D. Moore first read Gabaldon’s book after his wife, Terry Dresbach (“Outlander’s” costume designer), and producing partner Maril Davis, brought it to his attention during a dinner in Vancouver, as “Battlestar Galactica” (his former show) was wrapping up. When he reached the last part of the book, Moore was “surprised” by the twists it took, and knew it would present a unique challenge to try and get right in a television production.

“I was reading the book and I was surprised that that’s where the lead male protagonist was taken, you know, that that was the story and that wasn’t a story I had ever read before, and I immediately sort of realized, that, ‘Well, I haven’t seen this on TV or film, and this just isn’t the place that you typically take somebody,'” Moore told Access Hollywood, when we interviewed him about the finale. “And I thought, ‘Well, that alone is sort of an interesting challenge to do something — to go into some pretty taboo or forbidden areas,’ and that was sort of a challenge. … I knew it was shocking and I knew it would be controversial, but that was sort of an incentive, if anything, to try to pull it off — to see if you could actually manage this and see if you could play it in such a way that it felt inherent to the drama and that didn’t feel gratuitous or exploitative.”

The Wentworth Prison scenes with Jack and Jamie featured incredibly dark, complex and difficult material (and actors Heughan and Menzies did exceptional work). Asked if either of the actors had deep concerns about the scenes prior to filming, Moore said they didn’t, but there were discussions all season long about the characters.

“I don’t think either one of them had great concerns. I mean, again when they took the job, they sort of knew where this was all going, so there was an ongoing conversation with them all season… in preparation to the finale, just sort of checking in with the characters and where they sort of were on the larger story arc,” Moore said. “Both of them – Sam and Tobias – were really fearless in their performance. They just threw themselves into it. There was extra rehearsal time we gave them. The directors really sort of carved out some time so they could really dig into these characters and scenes, and the conversations with each of them always kind of centered around, well, what does their character want from the scene? Where are they going? What are they trying to do? What’s important to them? All the changes [that] happen along the way were usually in service of that idea.”

Read the rest of the article at the source