‘Outlander’ season 2, episode 11 reaction: Duncan Lacroix on Murtagh’s head-turning move

There were many surprises that we had as an “Outlander” fan and non-book reader with this past episode, but we feel like few ultimately compare to what was a gut-punch of an hour that aired on Starz this weekend. Over the course of the hour, the Duke of Sandringham went from being an enigmatic-but-shifty force within Scotland to a traitor to the Jacobite cause, an orchestrator, and ultimately a dead man as Murtagh avenged what transpired with Mary and Claire on the streets of France by taking off his head, not long after it was revealed that he was responsible for the rape that happened there.

What was it like for Duncan Lacroix to play this fantastic scene? Speaking to TVLine in a postmortem of the episode, he explains how what happened to Claire and Mary stuck with his character, and it prepared him to make this big strike in a significant, impactful way:

“I knew it was coming quite a ways off, from the books, that that was going to happen. Definitely after Mary gets raped in the alley, that’s something that settles very deep within him. As a matter of honor. If there’s one thing he can do, it’s look after the people around him. And when he fails at that task, that gnaws away at him. So when he finally does twig in that kitchen, that it was Sandringham behind everything, all those months of frustration [come to the fore].”

While this was a big move for saving Jamie and Claire’s future in the present, it remains to be seen what eliminating the Duke really does for the future of the Jacobite cause. Many of the larger threats are still out there, after all, and he was just someone responsible for playing the middle.

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