Outlander wrapped filming its eighth and final season on September 27, but Sophie Skelton — who plays Brianna — didn’t expect it to be such an emotional experience. That’s not for lack of love for the series — quite the opposite — but rather, she had already experienced the emotions of thinking the show would end before it was renewed for Season 8.
“It’s quite interesting because when we started filming Season 7, I think we all went in with the thought that [Season] 7 was going to actually be the final one,” Skelton tells TV Insider ahead of the Season 7 Part 2 premiere. “And so I think the writers were writing the season to ramp up to that, too. We’d kind of had a taster of how it might feel to be ending before we even got to [Season] 8.”
Previously thinking the show would soon end still didn’t prepare her for the real thing. “It’s sort of hit everyone in peaks and troughs and at different times” in the time since, Skelton shares. “It’s like going through the five stages of grief.”
“It’s been 10 years of people’s lives, so whether it’s for your character or for your job or for you as a person, there’s so much that we’ve all gone through and had it come in and out of our lives,” she continues. “And so I think everyone’s just been dealing with it in different ways.”
The weight of Outlander‘s impact really hit on that final day on set, but the emotions were unexpected for Skelton. She says the cast and crew were all “mourning” the end of their Outlander years that day.
“One similarity is that on the last day, we all shed some tears, which I don’t know if we were necessarily all expecting to do that,” Skelton reveals. “I think we made our peace with it. But it’s amazing what comes out when you see people you love around you breaking down and everything else. Cast and crew alike were just feeling the mourning of this beautiful thing that we’ve been making for the past 10 years.”
There are still plenty of Outlander episodes to see before Jamie and Claire’s epic love story comes to a close. Season 7 Part 2 premieres in November. But Skelton jokes that “maybe the press tour for Season 8 you’ll see us all crying.”
We’ll probably be crying, too.
