New Interview with Jon Gary Steele from Vulture

From Vulture:

Spoilers for the most recent episode of Outlander and the book series ahead.

Outlander production designer Jon Gary Steele doesn’t usually have time to hang around the shoots on the sets he designs, but he made an exception this season for King Louis XV’s Star Chamber. “I wanted to be there when everyone first walked in,” he told Vulture. “It’s fun to see the joy they got out of it, because they were all like, ‘Oh my God! This is awesome! This is so cool!'”

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“The floor looked like the most beautiful polished marble,” marveled actress Caitriona Balfe. “You feel like it should be echoing for hours.”

As soon as the king takes Claire to the hidden passageway and walks her through the double doors, you get the sense that this is no ordinary room in the palace, but one of mystery and wonder. While it’s a known fact of history that King Louis XV was fascinated by witchcraft and dabbled in the occult, there’s no historical record of him having a Star Chamber. It was up to Steele and his colleague, set decorator Gina Cromwell, to imagine what such a room might look like, starting with the brief description in Gabaldon’s novel, Dragonfly in Amber. There, she writes that the room was “quite dark, lit only by numerous tiny oil-lamps, set in groups of five in alcoves in the wall of the chamber.” The room is round, the ceiling is gilded, and two pentagrams are drawn on the flowered carpet. From that, and the research he did, Steele decided he wanted the Star Chamber to be a dome, with shafts of light piercing through it “so the light is on Claire.” He made sketches and then a model of it for showrunner Ron D. Moore. “He was like, ‘You want to do what? How does it work?'” Steele recalled. “And finally he said, ‘I love it. Build it.'”

They formed the dome with plaster and divided it into 12 sections so they could assemble it one chunk at a time, “like a slice of cake,” Steele said. Each piece was rigged to a wire frame and hoisted up to a grid on the ceiling, attaching it “like an umbrella in reverse.” A camera was put above the circle at the top, where it’s supposed to seem as if it opens to the sky, and the ceiling was painted blue. To make the starlight shine through, Steele climbed up on a ladder and put Post-it notes everywhere he wanted the carpenters to drill a hole. “At one point, Ron asked if we were going to make the stars in the form of constellations, like the Big Dipper,” Steele said. “If we had a lot more money and time, it would be!”