‘Outlander: Blood of My Blood’ Aftershow: Harriet Slater on Ellen’s Fight & Training

“We call it the Home Alone episode — all the ladies home alone at the house and being underestimated,” says executive producer Maril Davis of Season 2’s third installment of Outlander: Blood of My Blood. Watch the video above to see the creators and cast dish on the action-packed hour in our Outlander aftershow.

Hey, Kevin McCallister just might be a descendant of Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) from the looks of how she defended Castle Leoch along with her squad. Booby traps were set, baddies were taken down, and the true laird of the MacKenzies (that’s what we’re calling Ellen in this episode!) showed she had the grit and guts to lead a clan if not a country.

Slater shares her reaction to reading the script for the first time: “Oh man, I was just so excited to get stuck in because it was so much fun. We’ve never seen that side of Ellen before. We’ve never seen her fight physically. We didn’t even know she was capable of that. And I love the flashbacks that we see of her as a young girl with her dad [Red Jacob, played by Peter Mullan] teaching her how to use a bow and arrow. It just strengthens the argument that she would be perfect as laird because she’s clever, but she can also physically fight, thank goodness, because it means that she’s able to defend the castle whilst the men are away. And it was so much fun to spend so much time with the girls in the cast because Ellen, most of the time, is either with Brian [Jamie Roy] or her brothers [Colum, played by Séamus McLean Ross, and Dougal played by Sam Retford]. She doesn’t really have that much interaction with the women. It was really cool to see them all band together and kick some ass.”

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Slater practiced for all the big scenes, especially when it came to using a dirk. “I wanted to be able to do that myself rather than a stunt double. So, I was honestly just chilling at home watching TV whilst going [she shows the knife flipping action] until I got it right,” Slater says.

Davis, who’s been on set for some of the most intense scenes in both Outlander and its prequel, shares how extreme it got during the shoot: “Matt [executive producer Matthew B. Roberts] and I came down to a rehearsal and it was the ladies beating the crap out of the guys with the tapestry over them. They got really into it to the point where I was like, ‘Whoa, these girls, they had some violent streaks in them. They just had so much fun.’ And Harriet had so much fun with learning to shoot a bow and arrow and the choreography with the bat scene.”

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“It shows in this episode that Red Jacob was training her like she should have been the laird,” Roberts says. “I think he wanted that deep down and he knew it would never happen, but he trained her like that. And I think that’s what builds resentment between Colum and Dougal and their sister. Clearly, she was treated differently than they were. And there’s a line at the end where I think Colum recognizes it and he’s like, ‘Thank God dad treated you that way because we’d all be dead if he didn’t.’” Thanks, RJ.

Watch the video above for more from the creators and cast about this episode.

Outlander: Blood of My Blood, Fridays, Starz