The Starz fantasy Outlander introduces a number of characters from French, English, and American history who aid or hinder Claire on her journey.
The Starz historical drama series Outlander has a large cast of characters that includes a number of real-world figures that the fictitious ones interact with. Created by Ronald D. Moore and based on the novels by Diana Gabaldon, Outlander, follows Claire Fraser (Caitríona Balfe), a WWII nurse who is transported back in time to 1743 England. There, Claire meets the ancestors of her contemporaries and becomes embroiled in historical events from the time period. Balfe and the show have received multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for their work. It’s a sprawling series that uses the historical setting as a backdrop to the romance between Claire and Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan).
Over the course of six seasons of Outlander, Claire and Jamie travel across the globe with real-life history as the basis of many of the seasons’ plots. The Jacobite Rebellion, the Age of Piracy, the Regulator Movement, and the lead-up to the American Revolutionary War are depicted throughout the series. Consequently, Claire meets many real-life historical figures throughout her journey and her knowledge of the past events creates dramatic tension as she sometimes tries to explain the future to the figures working towards it. The characterizations of these historical figures are usually true to life, but there are details in the writing that add depth to the cast.
Jamie is an original creation for Outlander, but his character comes from a real story. Some Outlander viewers may have missed Jamie Fraser was inspired by a story of a Jacobite soldier who survived the Battle of Culloden. After the catastrophic fight, a group of soldiers slipped away from the British and took refuge in a farmhouse. The survivors were discovered and summarily shot, save for one man named “Fraser”. The series never reveals if these are the same men, but it would make sense that one of the few named soldiers of the Jacobite Rebellion would have a story to tell, and Gabaldon’s admission of inspiration all but confirms it.
One of the villains Claire encounters on her trip to France is Comte St. Germain (Stanley Weber), a French nobleman who has some mysterious and dangerous interests. Both the character and the real-life figure are equally unknowable, but Outlander’s version deserved harsher consequences for how awfully he treated Claire and Jamie. The real-life Comte St. Germain is as mysterious as Outlander’s version and, according to Britannica, the details of his life before being arrested as a Jacobite spy in 1748 are a mystery. His wandering travels saw the Comte dabble in alchemy, and he was a close confidant of Louis XV.
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