Sophie Skelton Interview on Her Brianna Audition for ‘Outlander’

We have read several past interviews that it took a while to cast both Roger and Brianna.  If you were online and a fan when Richard Rankin was cast, you know there was a small gap between casting Richard and then Sophie Skelton.  There were also casting calls for Brianna a long time before Brianna was ever cast.  In this interview with Bazaar, Sophie Skelton touches on a reason for it.  Excerpts are below, but head over to Bazaar to read the entire interview.

“I always do a lot of research when I’m auditioning for a role, so this TV series wasn’t out yet,” she says. “I just had the script to go from, but I called this local bookstore where I was staying and asked if they had the books and if they could sort of ship them in overnight. And I went and picked up the books, and then read as much about Brianna as I could. I just sort of fell in love with her. She’s one of those characters that you feel quite protective over all of a sudden, and I think she’s funny.”

Despite her instant passion for Brianna, she didn’t immediately hear back about the role. “You do so many auditions that you can’t really think about it, but there are some that actually really sting,” she says. “And with Brianna, I was really quite gutted that I didn’t get the role.”

“And I was like, ‘I did audition for this about a year ago,'” she says. “And then I just found out that they never actually brought her into the series like they were going to. And then, yeah, that was that.”

It sounds like there was a possibility that Brianna was supposed to be in season one somehow and then it was changed or they meant to mirror the structure of Dragonfly in Amber and have her in the first episode of season two. Brianna makes her first appearance at the end of season two.

Source: Bazaar