Young Ian and Rachel Hunter make love for the first time following their wedding.
Outlander is known for the steamy love scenes between Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire Fraser (Caitríona Balfe), whose love story continues to unfold even as it matures, but now, in the second half of Season 7, there’s once again a young love story with a new couple that took their vows and had a passionate, on-screen wedding night: Young Ian (John Bell) and his Quaker bride Rachel Hunter (Izzy Meikle-Small).
To make sure the actors were comfortable and to ensure a safe work environment, Outlander intimacy coordinator Vanessa Coffey worked with John and Izzy to hit just the right note.
“We had a lot of time to kind of think about that scene, rehearse the scene, chat through the scene,” John tells Parade of Ian and Rachel making love for the first time. “That was probably one of the scenes we were most prepared to film by the time it came. However, the day arrives and, yes, there’s nerves. Not only because of the topic at hand, but also because you want to do it right.”
What also helped the two get it right was the trust they’ve built in each other in the short time they’ve worked together. While John has been on the show since Season 3, Izzy only joined in Season 7.
‘We have great chemistry together,” John continues. “It very quickly felt like the skeleton of this scene was already so solid that we had places and moments to breathe and improvise and have fun with it. I think that leaves the scene feeling really natural, really sweet and really adorable for these characters. It’s something just nice to watch.”
Young Ian was raised Catholic but his time living with the Mohawk tribe introduced him to new ways of thinking about religion, and in his love for Rachel, he wanted her to have the wedding she wanted. They had a hard time finding a Friends’ meeting that would allow them to wed, part of the difficulty could be attributed to Ian’s Mohawk appearance. It raises the question: Since he is once again living among the white man, why not change his appearance for the woman he loves?
“Let’s be real,” John says. “His hair was plucked, so I don’t think that’s coming back anytime soon. But I do think you see a little bit of his costume begin to change. He is moving slightly back towards a more typical dress of the time, of European immigrants, colonizers. There’s a balance that he’s beginning to strike between his Mohawk identity and his experiences as a North Carolina settler. He’s not going to compromise the whole way. I don’t think he’s just going to go back to dressing all plain, but you do see him maybe give a little bit of a tip of the hat to that.”
And Rachel most likely doesn’t want him to. She fell in love with the man he is. Not to mention, she isn’t a typical Quaker. She did follow her brother Denzel (Joey Phillips) to war, which got them thrown out of their meeting, even though all Denzel planned to do as part of the revolution was use his doctoring skills to save lives.
But when William (Charles Vandervaart), who is jealous that Ian and Rachel are engaged, has Ian arrested for assaulting a British officer, Izzy slaps him. Totally against Quaker beliefs.
“She’s always been sassy, she’s always had fire, she’s always going to be one to stand up to injustices,” Izzy tells Parade. “But probably Ian has had a bit of an influence on her. I think being surrounded by violence at war has also had an influence on her. All of these things have.”
It doesn’t help that Rachel was recently attacked by Arch Bug (Hugh Ross), who was out to hurt Young Ian by taking from him the thing he loved most after Ian inadvertently killed his wife. Ian actually thought it was Arch he had shot but it was Mrs. Bug (Sarah Collier) who returned to the ashes of the Big house on Fraser’s Ridge to retrieve the stolen Jacobite gold.
“She’s very aware of the fact that violence is around her and I think that she’s constantly questioning her Quaker beliefs about whether violence is necessary or not,” Izzy continues. “In that moment she obviously deemed it necessary. That doesn’t mean that she’s changed her whole opinion on the matter. I think arguably that was her very much betraying her principles. That doesn’t mean that she’s changing. She’s still a very much steadfast Quaker, but maybe she’s starting to see that violence is sometimes necessary.”
New episodes of the second half of Outlander Season 7 will premiere at midnight ET on the STARZ app, all STARZ streaming and on-demand platforms each Friday. On linear broadcast, it will debut on STARZ Friday nights at 8 p.m. ET in the U.S.