Outlander’s showrunner Matthew B. Roberts shed some light on one of the characters excluded from the show.
Outlander is known for its vast character list which grows ever longer with each season.
Now, the Starz drama’s showrunner Matthew B. Roberts has spoken up about one figure who is quite a formidable figure in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novel series but is absent from the show.
Speaking on the official Outlander podcast, the producer said: “As the Outlander world grows, this means more animals, more kids.”
He continued: “[O]ne of the questions we got for season four on is what happened to the White Sow and I will tell you this is that pigs aren’t production-friendly in that sense, certainly not in the way it was written in the book.
“So the White Sow got its own little pen on Fraser’s Ridge.”
Roberts added: “I don’t know where it is but it’s somewhere and the White Sow is living a happy life.”
In the books, the White Sow appears in Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes and An Echo in the Bone.
Jamie Fraser (played by Sam Heughan) even says about the White Sow in one letter how the creature is “of Prodigious Size, a most Stubborn Temper, and not lacking in Teeth”.
He later says of the White Sow living under the foundations of the house and how it “engages in such debauches that our Dinner is disturbed daily by hellish Noises resembling the Sounds of Souls in Torment”.
However, from Roberts’ words it appears trying to get a real-life pig to act in such a specific way wouldn’t have worked for the purposes of the show.
Roberts went on to detail the filming challenges of shooting with the dog who plays Young Ian Murray’s (John Bell) faithful companion Rollo.
He said: “The thing that gives us the most challenges than you might imagine is children and animals because they don’t always do what you hope they do, they do other things and you have to make that work.
“So making Rollo sit where he’s supposed to sit, walk where he’s supposed to walk, pay attention to who they’re supposed to pay attention to within the scene, sometimes it doesn’t work.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re waist high, we’re staying waist high and the reason we’re staying waist-high is because there’s a dog down there and the dog doesn’t have to be in the shot.”
Roberts said it was “one of the tricks of the trade” to only have Rollo in shot when he was absolutely needed in the scene and the rest of the time to shoot above the canine.
He said the camera would “stay off the dog” or the child and the filmmakers would “frame the shot to help you out”.
By doing this, it helped with shooting and timing on the show with the same rule applied to both animals and children.
