Here is a NEW Interview with Jessica Reynolds From Town & Country
From Town & Country:
When I first meet Jessica Reynolds, she is beaming with nervous energy. We’re at the Royal Festival Hall in London for the premiere of Outlander’s sixth season, and she’s clearly excited to be there, just taking in the whole spectacle of the highly choreographed event. “This is my first red carpet. It’s wild,” she says. “It’s easy to be overwhelmed and kind of feel unworthy in these situations when you’re new to it all, but I’m just trying to enjoy it. I just get giggly. How lucky am I?”
Standing in front of me in a sleek black gown paired with architectural heels and a bold red lip, Reynolds and her exuberance are completely at odds with the tragedy that befalls her character on the show.
More after the jump!
She plays Malva Christie this season, a newcomer to Fraser’s Ridge, whose story quickly becomes entwined with that of the Frasers. “She comes into the Ridge. She’s heard from her dad that Jamie is this powerful person, and I think she’s so excited to meet him,” Reynolds says. (Malva’s father, an abusive, intensely religious man named Tom Christie, knew Jamie from their time in Ardsmuir Prison after the failed Jacobite rebellion.) “Then she sees Claire, and she’s just enraptured. She’s never seen a woman like this in her life. She lost her mom when she was very young, and she thinks, ‘What can I do to be anything close to that?’ It starts off really sweetly and innocently and then family life takes over, and it all kind of unravels in the way that I don’t think Malva wanted it to. It’s not the prettiest ending.”
The ending Reynolds is alluding to plays out in this week’s episode, when, after revealing that she is pregnant, Malva falsely accuses Jamie of being the father of her unborn child. That confrontation was actually Reynolds’s audition scene for the role.
“That scene was one of the first ones I learned, and with so much going on in Malva’s head, I’m glad I had that from the start because I was able to sit with it for so long,” she later tells me over the Zoom. “I had time to let that scene grow, and breathe, and we spent a lot of time on it. We spent a full day filming take, after take, after take, after take, but I think that’s exactly what it needed, because it’s such a dynamic scene.”
Leave a Reply