How ‘Spartacus’ Redefined Sam Heughan’s Brutal ‘Outlander’ Scenes for Graham McTavish
What To Know
- Graham McTavish found the physical training for his role in Spartacus: House of Ashur to be the most challenging of his career, surpassing the boot camps for Outlander and The Hobbit.
- Mastering the bullwhip for Spartacus was particularly difficult due to its technical demands and the real risk of injury.
- McTavish explains how this redefined his understanding of Sam Heughan’s Outlander experience.
Graham McTavish is no stranger to onscreen combat. He played Scottish war chief Dougal MacKenzie in Outlander‘s first two seasons, and he faced battles in Middle-earth in Peter Jackson‘s Hobbit trilogy. However, training to play the gladiator trainer, Korris, in Spartacus: House of Ashur was “by far the hardest” boot camp yet, McTavish tells TV Insider. And his weapons training experience on the Spartacus spinoff gave him a new understanding of his good friend, Sam Heughan‘s, experience filming Outlander Season 1.
McTavish uses an authentic bullwhip while training his gladiators in Ashur’s (Nick E. Tarabay) ludus in the bloody Starz drama. Korris is a retired gladiator who earned his freedom and is now training men — and, for the first time in this franchise, a woman — to fight for glory in the arenas of Ancient Rome. Korris fights on the streets of Capua as well. He may be a retired gladiator, but his body count is still racking up.
“The training was very tough. It doesn’t get any easier,” McTavish says. “I did what they call boot camp. I did it for The Hobbit. I did it for Outlander, and now for this. This is by far the hardest one because you just have to have a level of fitness and agility that is believable, really. And certainly for the guys in the ludus, they really, really, really had to be on top form because they were fighting quite literally every day in one form or another. It was great. I like those challenges.”
McTavish may have welcomed these new challenges, but he still underestimated the difficulties of working with a whip.
“I’ve got to be honest, the whip was quite tricky. I wish I could just say, ‘Hey, the whip was nothing.’ No, the swords were fine. That was fine. No problem with the swords. The whip, it’s so much technique,” he explains. “There was one style that I could do pretty well, but then there were other more fancy styles. They were pretty tricky, but we got there. We got there in the end.”
He explained the difficult mechanics of the weapon, saying that, unlike with a sword, which can have a fake blade so as not to injure anyone, there’s no faking a whip. “There was a real crack, and when you did it, terrifying,” he says.
“It’s how you move it over your head. If you can go up and down, you do a swirling action, you do a whip across, and with those whips, you have to make absolutely sure that they never hit you because it really hurts,” McTavish explains. “It really, really, really hurts. So it gives me newfound respect for Sam being brutally whipped all through Outlander.”
Heughan had a handful of scenes where his Outlander character, Jamie Fraser, was whipped by Captain Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies). The second of the two instances left Jamie with gruesome scars all over his back that can never fully fade. Heughan, of course, didn’t actually receive any lashings, but Spartacus gave McTavish a new understanding of how exhausting those scenes must have been to film and how well choreographed they had to have been to ensure Heughan’s safety.
Spartacus: House of Ashur, Fridays, 9/8c, Starz
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