Brief Take: Where does Outlander fit on your acting journey?
Tim Downie: It’s really good. It’s really, really good! I do quite a fair lot of period stuff. I spend a lot of time in wigs and very heavy brocaded jackets. So it fits in very nicely. It seems to be in my oeuvre, if you will. But it’s nice to do something that I can get my teeth into. I do a lot of comedy so it’s nice to kind of get under someone, really get into them and play someone who…you know, there’s a lot to him, and he can be quite dark. You don’t know where you are with him – is he friend or foe? What is he? There’s a lot to draw on, and he’s quite fun to play, and that’s great fun.
BT: What is your base for the Governor? Do you look to the book, history or the scripts?
TD: I’m led by the script. I do a lot of reading and it’s nice that I do play someone real, that you can kind of look back at him, or look back at the character, and kind of work out “okay, would this be some of the events in his life, what he did, where he’s from, where he was educated?”, and that would help to kind of colour how the character would work with certain people, with the echelons of life, that kind of thing. Especially at that time period, it was very class-driven, it would be very interesting to see how he would react to certain people of certain classes. I think that this is where some background reading really helps because that builds certain elements of character into it, which is fascinating. I got a fair bit on social media about when the hurricane came to Wilmington and actually flooded Tryon’s house. And that was interesting at a time when I just finished, it was like life imitating art, suddenly. Someone who I had never even heard of before until playing him, suddenly was upfront, it was very recent history and it was happening right at the time. It’s striking that we’re dealing with something that happened more than three hundred years ago, and it literally could have been yesterday.
I didn’t recognize him at first, but he played the Governor brilliantly. This fellow keeps showing up which stresses everyone out. He and his taxes just won’t go away.