We already knew that Jamie was taking Claire’s departure back through the stones hard. But the second episode of Outlander‘s third season reveals just how much the loss of his Sassenach spouse has affected the handsome Highlander. Picking up in 1752, six years after Jamie’s miraculous survival at the Battle of Culloden, “Surrender” finds him skulking around the forest surrounding his family home of Lallybroch in the unkempt guise of the outlaw, the Dunbonnet. To say Jamie doesn’t look his best would be an understatement: with his long, tangled hair, a beard with the consistency of steel wool and skin that clearly hasn’t seen a sponge in at least three years, he’s the 18th-century embodiment of the 21st-century word, fugly. The person tasked with giving Sam Heughan this extreme makeover is the show’s makeup designer, Annie McEwan. Yahoo TV spoke with McEwan about designing the Dunbonnet’s look, and how Heughan likes being mucky.
How did you go about transforming the dashing Sam Heughan into the ratty Dunbonnet?
The word that we used was feral. Jamie’s gone feral; he’s not washing or maybe washing once a month. He’s not looking after himself. He’s sort of given up a bit. So Sam had to be as unkempt and as mucky as we could do with makeup. I don’t know if you can even see that there’s some dreadlocks in his hair, but we did put some dreadlocks in it. The beard was hair-length and glued-on, because we didn’t have time for Sam to grow that big a beard. And then it was just about building up layers of dirt [with makeup].
There are six years between the end of Culloden and finding him in this cave, so it was an opportunity to age him up as well. He’s so golden, Sam. We took out the goldenness to make him a bit more gray and a bit more lifeless. I don’t know how much shows on camera, but they did a lot of work on him. A lot of little lines around his eyes from peering through the smoke of the fire and scrunching his eyes up. We looked at books about explorers and mountain men and how their faces had been coarsened by the weather. We tried to get all that in with paint. We also highlighted under his lashes and darkened them just to make that pouch be more prominent, and communicate Jamie’s depression. What we were trying to get away from is him looking gorgeous and not aged, so we did the opposite of that.
