Warning: Spoilers ahead for Outlander: Blood of My Blood Season 1, Episode 6. Step away if you haven’t caught up yet!
If you’re anything like me, while you love all of the romance, battle scenes and other wonderful things that being an Outlander fan has given us, you can’t quite deny the impact of the harrowing and traumatic events that the characters have gone through over the years. The 2025 TV schedule is delivering more of everything with the prequel, Outlander: Blood of My Blood, and I’m totally stressed out just after hearing what star Hermione Corfield went through during the birthing scene.
What Did Outlander: Blood Of My Blood’s Star Say About How The Birthing Scene ‘Exhausted’ Her?
As we all sensed would come to pass after the events of Outlander: Blood of My Blood (which has a different theme song from its parent show) Season 1, Episode 5, things did, in fact, get worse for Julia and Henry in the sixth episode. Claire’s parents are still both stuck in 1714 and in impossible situations as they try to find one another, but Julia is, arguably, in the more difficult position. She’s a woman who was sold into servitude and then had to have sex with Lord Lovat to pass her and Henry’s child off as the master’s baby, hoping that it would keep both of them alive and at least somewhat safe.
Though the first couple of episodes followed the first month after the Beauchamps time traveled to the past (separately), we’ve now moved ahead enough that Julia was ready to give birth a few minutes into the episode. The arrival of Claire’s new little brother (Oh, well. There goes part of my amazing Outlander Season 8 theory.) was hardly an easy one for Julia, but it turns out that it was rough on her portrayer, Hermione Corfield, as well. She recently told Variety that filming the birth was “so intense” because it took basically “a whole week,” and added:
[For the main birthing scene], we were in that room filming for three or four days. I wanted to map out the intensity of the contractions, as well as the intensity of the women for this moment because it kind of goes hand in hand. They both get more and more wild as the scene goes on.
To say that the rather large group of women (Scottish midwives known as “howdies”) who helped Julia give birth got increasingly “wild” as it went on is kinda an understatement, as far as I’m concerned. Even when the ladies are on her side in the beginning, they all seem flat-out nutty in a way that had me thinking they were part of some birthing cult that might leave Julia to die so they could run off with her baby and raise it in the woods or something.
Of course, things got way worse from there, after Lovat’s head maid/Brian’s mom, Davina, openly suggests that Julia “seduced” the lord. The women are already surrounding her and moaning and crying as she does, then they begin to paw at her, turn her out of the bed she’s in and encircle her as they sneer and yell, and three women off to the side try to “save” her soul in a scene that feels like it came straight out of a weird horror movie (all while Julia is literally in labor). Honestly? I feel queasy thinking about it. Corfield continued:
The main thing for Julia is she is just in absolute animal instinct mode. She’s purely trying to protect this child, and that’s her only intention. The howdies were having to grab onto me and I was being sort of manhandled all day every day. So it was really quite easy to do, because I didn’t have to pretend to be exhausted. I was absolutely exhausted fighting for my life!
Goodness! Corfield had to film part of the scene on her knees on the straw-strewn floor, as Julia collapsed during a contraction while pleading for help and attempting to convince the women that the lord really was the father and that she didn’t seek him out.
Considering what happens in the extended scene, I can completely understand that the actress had no trouble looking and sounding as worn out as she did. Now I just wonder if she needed as much deodorant from stress sweat while filming as I did after watching what she and Julia went through.
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