Google Jeremy Irvine’s name, and among the first results are articles praising his extreme immersion into the roles he plays – as the famous story goes, he spent so much time in a recreated Battle of the Somme for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse that he contracted trench foot. Even so, he’s remarkably reluctant to be held on any kind of pedestal because of his reputation for method acting.
“The trench foot wasn’t deliberate,” he swiftly clarifies to me as I speak to him over Zoom from his rented accommodation in Glasgow. “But I’ll take it if people want to give me the credit for that.
“I’m never quite sure what people mean when they say ‘method acting’. What do I do when my mum calls me? Do I get my iPhone and say ‘What the hell is this?’ I think it’s a bit ridiculous.”
He’s in the Scottish city “basically just hanging out with pals”, who happen to be his co-stars in the second season of Outlander: Blood of my Blood. The first season comes out this week – a decade and a half after his big break in War Horse, the project marks a return for Irvine to stories set during and after the First World War. Only difference is, like the original Outlander series (and the books upon which it was based), there’s also time travel to 18th century Scotland involved.
Irvine is hardly new to the period drama – he has the kind of broad, stoic face that belongs in 19th and early 20th century settings. After War Horse, there was Pip in Great Expectations, a prisoner of war in The Railway Man, a sadistic Ivor Novello in Siegfried Sassoon biopic Benediction. He also has form for prequels, with musical theatre fans remembering him mainly as the young Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. (“No one was expected to be Pavarotti there,” he recalls fondly.) But this is the first time an Irvine character has actively existed in two separate time periods.
“I decided that my character was just trying to survive second by second,” he says, “rather than having a big existential crisis of ‘Oh, my God, I’m back in time’. It’s a lot more playable as an actor, because [in normal life] unless we’re on our own, in private, we’re not really going to be thinking existentially about where we are in our lives right now.”
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If you’d rather not spend your time brushing up on the knotty Outlander family tree, the main point to note here is that Irvine plays Henry, the father of Claire Beauchamp – who travelled back in time and fell in love with Sam Heughan’s dashing Jacobite Jamie Fraser in the original series. Alongside Claire’s mother Julia (played by Hermione Corfield, a close friend of Irvine’s), Henry seemingly died in a car accident while his daughter was still a child. In Blood of my Blood it’s revealed that he and Julia ended up on a time travel journey of their own, with Henry promptly falling into the heady, mafia-esque world of clan warfare in the 1700s Highlands. (As one does.)
Henry’s first appearance in Blood of my Blood actually occurs before the timeline has pivoted back to the twentieth century and his early wartime courtship with Julia, when he appears, stilted and with a conspicuous English accent, at a ceremony involving several rival clans. It’s a moment of confused dread for the audience, an encounter with someone who’s a clear outsider on several levels.
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Read more“Myths, legends, witches, fairies are very much a real thing to these people,” Irvine says of his approach to Henry’s opening scene. “If you’re showing any signs of not being from this world, it could be very dangerous for you. Inside, [Henry] can be panicking, but on the outside, he’s got to keep up the front [at the ceremony]. The more obstacles you put in the way of a character, the more interesting it is to play.”
In the two episodes made available to press, there’s a heavy sense of everything that came before. Henry and Julia have already met several younger versions of original Outlander characters, and there’s one particularly loaded use of the name “James”. Outlander never quite made it to cultural touchstone status in the UK, but it regularly inspires devotees from the other side of the Atlantic to make tearful pilgrimages to filming locations, or to queue at dawn to take a photo with Heughan. Is it at all intimidating for Irvine to have all of the weight of an existing franchise on his shoulders?
“I think I was in ignorant bliss before we went out to the States to do our press tours [for season one]. So I feel more pressure going into [the second season], because these people aren’t our fans yet. They’re the fans of the guys who did the first lot. And we’ve got to earn that.”
Reflecting on the impact of being a small cog in a wider cultural behemoth – especially as he takes his first steps into the DC cinematic universe in an undisclosed future Green Lantern project – Irvine seems blissfully unaffected either by the pressures of fame or by the desire to hunt it down. Much has been made of his first onscreen role being directed by Spielberg, but the main thing he remembers from that time is deciding to miss an opportunity to go to the Oscars because of exhaustion from the endless cycle of award shows, press junkets and transatlantic flights.
“I look back at that now, and I kick myself – what an idiot,” he says. “What I’ve learned now is every few years, you’re lucky enough to do something that really resonates with people, and you have to milk every moment and enjoy it. Now, I pour my heart and soul into filming, and if it works, ‘great’, and if it doesn’t, ‘onto the next one’.”
In place of a lust for stardom is a genuine intellectual interest in the roles he plays. It’s perhaps this sense of the importance of research, of leaving no stone unturned, that underpins Irvine’s approach, rather than the kind of obsessive, life-consuming commitment to a role associated with a Christian Bale or a Daniel Day-Lewis (even though Irvine did undertake a dramatic physical transformation for The Railway Man).
In preparation for his role as Henry in Blood of my Blood, who suffers from wartime PTSD throughout the series, he read Robert Graves’ seminal wartime autobiography Goodbye To All That. He movingly describes the way Graves conveys a sense of his own “fragility and kindness”, even when thrust into the horror of the trenches.
“I read so much fiction for work that actually, to relax, I tend to read factual stuff,” says Irvine. His interest in the First World War has even extended to writing documentaries about the period earlier in his career, which he says “never quite happened”. He’s perhaps at his most animated when we discuss Benediction, the 2021 Sassoon biopic, where he was able to embrace the arrogance of Sassoon’s abusive lover Novello – and he yearns to play the campy villain more often, even joking, “Maybe I should act like more of an asshole in auditions?”
Every time he talks about being on set, though, it comes back to some kind of meaningful personal interaction with a cast or crew member – the late Benediction director Terence Davies letting him “do something a bit mad” and wear thick black eyeliner with white face paint; drunken weekends away on the west coast of Scotland with his Blood of my Blood co-stars; the Mamma Mia cast lazing on beaches and washing off their makeup in the sea.
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Read moreThere’s a keen awareness to Irvine of how important it is to cultivate trust with his fellow actors. He’s straightforward about the importance of a structured approach to sex on screen – his character has had two sex scenes in as many episodes of Blood of my Blood – and appreciates how intimacy coordination has become more widespread in the industry. At the same time, though, there’s room for humour, with one of his favourite on-set stories revolving around Hermione Corfield, the actor who plays his wife, and a joke she made about the intimacy underwear commonly worn by male actors in sex scenes, a kind of beige drawstring pouch.
“I won’t tell you which animal she said it looked like,” he laughs. “We know each other so well that at times it can be very funny. I’m not afraid of looking shit in front of her, so it means you can try some wackier things.”
His and Corfield’s bond is especially crucial given the tighter turnaround expected of actors on US productions: “Most of the time, there isn’t rehearsal for this stuff. What you’re seeing on screen is likely the fourth or fifth time that we’ve ever done that scene together, so it helps to have the easy shorthand [Hermione and I] have with each other. It’s all just a very instinctive gut reaction, like when you meet a [real life] couple, and there’s just chemistry, and it’s very difficult to pinpoint what that chemistry is.”
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Although the most affection is reserved for Corfield – whom Irvine’s known for ten years and whom he “probably drove the director and producers mad” trying to get cast in the show – but the feeling of camaraderie seems to extend to the entire cast: “We all hang out more off set than we do on set.” They’ve just got back from hiring a boat on Loch Lomond, with backdrops much like the series itself, but with “less questionable accents”.
“I’ve done lots of jobs where I haven’t had that [friendship], and especially where I haven’t had that chemistry with a love interest. You can fake it, but it’s hard work, and it’s not particularly enjoyable. You see some actors doing press and junkets and going, ‘We’re best mates’. You do always say that, but in this case, we really are.”
It’s a refreshing reminder that behind all the headline-grabbing weight loss transformations and immersive war zone recreations, there’s a group of people spending a great deal of time in each other’s company – whatever time period it happens to be. For Jeremy Irvine, that frienship is ultimately what comes first.
Stream the latest episode of Outlander: Blood of My Blood every Saturday on MGM+
