EXCLUSIVE: Outlander star Sam Heughan will star as the murderous tyrant in Macbeth, marking his debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he tells Deadline that returning to the stage for the first time in 12 years “is the drug I’m looking for.”
The actor, who has cropped his locks for the role, says it’s “exciting” to be treading the boards again now that filming is compete on the eighth and final season of the time-traveling drama Outlander, in which he plays the the dashingly charming Jamie Fraser who finds true love with Claire, played by Caitríona Balfe.
During our conversation, Heughan suggested that Starz will show season 8 of Outlander “towards next year.” The prequel series Outlander: Blood of My Blood premieres on August 8, “so I feel it’d probably be out next year,” he reveals.
Caitríona Balfe and Sam Heughan in ‘Outlander’ (Starz)
Macbeth, to be directed by Daniel Raggett, will begin performances at RCS’ The Other Place studio venue in Stratford-upon-Avon on October 9, running through December 6.
Lia Williams, the distinguished, classically trained thespian, will play Lady Macbeth. She’s also a prominent presence on TV, having appeared as Wallis Simpson in The Crown and as Isabel Kirby, the duplicitous MI6 British intelligence service deputy chief of staff in Peacock’s hit The Day of the Jackal.
“I was looking for something that would really excite me. I’ve been doing Outlander for 11 years, and obviously it was brilliant, but I wanted something else,” says Heughan. “And I went to the RSC to see Edward II there, and I just felt that buzz. I sat in the auditorium and I felt that excitement, sort of the churn in my stomach as the lights went down and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the drug I’m looking for.’ And it’s terrifying. And I think that’s a good thing to be scared again.”
The last time Heughan was on stage was in Batman Live, where he played the Caped Crusader in uncomfortably snug tights.
He says the show “was not quite Shakespeare or the RSC, but it was an international tour going all around from the whole of UK and Europe to the U.S. We did Las Vegas, we played in Bueno Aires and the O2 in London hanging upside down, wearing PVC.”
Merrily, he quips: “I dunno, maybe there’ll be a bit of that in Macbeth as well. You never know.”
Completing work on the Outlander series presented the perfect opportunity for the actor to return to his stage roots.
“I think that’s it,” he agrees.
The actor trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, now called the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. “I did a classical theater training, and I built my career on theater. That’s what I did way before I got any sort of TV jobs and trying to support myself in Scottish theater and then in London as well. And it’s obviously a dream. I remember just going full circle like, going back to the very first show I ever did in youth theater. I was an extra on the main stage of the Royal Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh in a production of Macbeth. And for me it’s The Scottish Play [for superstitious reasons, thespians often refer to Macbeth by that title] obviously, but it’s a play that’s super-exciting. It’s one of his shortest. It’s bloody. It’s got some incredible writing and some really fascinating character at the center of it. And I just remember being in the library as a drama student, reading books about various famous actors playing that role.”
Heughan remembers seeing Adrian Noble’s RSC production of the play touring Scotland with Derek Jacobi in the title role “and just being in awe of them and dreaming that one day I’d be there.”
The closest he got was playing the roles of Malcolm, a soldier and a “murderer” as the program note lists it, opposite Liam Brennan as the Thane who would be king, in a production that played the Royal Lyceum and Nottingham Playhouse in 2008, directed by Lucy Pitman-Wallace.
Sam Heughan and Lia Williams in marketing artwork for ‘Macbeth’ (Sebastian Nevelson/RSC)
As a student, he watched the video version of Patrick Stewart essaying the once loyal and valiant general-turned-treasonous killer of a king in director Rupert Goold’s celebrated production that played the West End and Broadway.
Importantly, he watched the thrilling filmed adaptation of Macbeth starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. In 1976, Trevor Nunn had directed the play for the RSC at The Other Place,and it’s now regarded as one of the greatest productions of The Scottish Play ever staged.
“The last people to do [Macbeth] in that theatre wwere Ian McKellen and Judi Dench,” Heughan observes, “so we’re very lucky.”
There will be ghosts in that house, I suggest.
Heughan laughs but says in all seriousness: ”There will be, and I hope we can draw upon their talent and their expertise.”
Judi Dench and Ian McKellen in Trevor Nunn’s 1976 RSC production of ‘Macbeth’(ay Cocks Studio Collection/Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)
The tragedy of Macbeth is that, upon hearing the three witches’ prophecy that he would become King of Scotland, he becomes tyrannical and, with his wife’s help, he murders the monarch who stands in his way. But is his missus to blame, or, I ask Heughan, am I being kind to Macbeth?
“What’s so great about Shakespeare,” he says brightly, “is that it can be read in many different ways and portrayed in different ways. And you could say, ‘Well, it’s always been in him and he’s an evil man and he wanted to do this.’ Or you could say that he is on this path that he’s been set on by some supernatural powers or it’s his ambition. Or in my case, I think perhaps it might be more that he loves someone so much and he wants to fulfill her ambition as well. But it’s about making one decision and then the consequences of that, and he just can’t get out of it and takes it way too far. But yeah, I mean, obviously he starts down this slippery slope and can’t stop it and goes really far with it, but it’s super-fascinating. I mean, we haven’t started rehearsals yet, but we’ll be looking at what is it that drives him and all of the superstition around it as well.”
In terms of wrongheaded, misguided polices, I mention, mischievously, if the White House might be a suitable location for the play to be set.
“Yeah, again, I think it’s the beauty of Shakespeare is you can always draw parallels, and that’s why it’s still so popular now. You can look at any country or anything that’s going on anywhere and see that in the wrong hands, power corrupts. I mean, he really does shut everyone down and start to destroy anyone that can pose a threat to him. So yeah, I won’t be playing it with a ginger wig or in a suit.”
Or an overlong blue tie, I add wickedly.
“Well, you never know. Maybe I will,” he responds wryly.
Actually, Heughan and Williams have had discussions with director Raggett about where to set it.
“We’ve been talking about lots of different ways of portraying it and whether that’s, I feel, been done before. But you could set it the conflict in Ukraine or on the Russian border or whatever, or you could set it, as you suggested, in America right now. It could be kind of set anywhere. So we haven’t fully decided, but I think we know which direction we’re going.”
We chatted during a break from a table read of the text. Just before our meeting in London, he got stopped by three Spanish tourists “and they were excited. I’m surprised they recognized me,” he says, laughing, “because I’ve shaved my head for the role.”
Explaining his rationale for the new look, Heughan says, “It’s also about a new skin and a new me and new beginnings and shedding a bit of Jamie Fraser, though he was a wig as well. But I think it’s an interesting look. Certainly I’m getting used to it.”
When he saw Raggett’s production of Edward II starring Daniel Evans, who’s also the RSC’s co-artistic director with Tamara Harvey, he says that he felt “that excitement and that fear that got me into theater and made me an actor in the first place. And I think that’s what I want to do with this play. I want people to come to see Macbeth and be properly scared.”
RSC co-artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey (Baz Bamigboye/Deadline)
Working on Outlander for 11years, he says, “dominated” his life. “It becomes your life a hundred percent. And in some ways that’s fantastic, and I’ve been very lucky. I’ve obviously been able to do some movies and TV shows and things, but it does define you and it also dictates where you live and what time you have and where you are in the world physically and where your energy goes. So this is really cool. It’s a chance for me to sort of, I don’t know, find out who I am again or where I was and see what the next step is. And it feels like home already going into Stratford-upon-Avon. … It feels familiar and walking onto the stage and soaking that up. So it’s a part of myself that I’ve perhaps had forgotten about.”
Also, he adds that he feels proud as a native of Scotland to be playing a role that’s associated with the country of his birth.
He’s thrilled that the cast is “predominantly all Scottish actors.” There’s a great pool of talent in Scotland, he boasts, “and a great vibrancy and energy,” adding, “I’m so excited to have this little bit of Scotland in Stratford-upon-Avon flying our flag.”
Heughan also has announcements planned for his Sassenach Spirits brand. Perhaps he’ll gift wrap a few bottles as first-night gifts for his cast mates.
RELATED: ‘Outlander’ Cast Marks Conclusion Of Filming After 8-Season Run: “What A Journey”
There’s also sadness with moving on from Outlander. He had lunch with Balfe last week. “It was so lovely to see her. She’s obviously in London as well, and so we’re all very, very close still and we’re always sending each other messages and stuff. So that’s, I guess, one of the great parts of our show. We really have this lovely friendship now, and I’m sure that we’ll follow each other in subsequent years.”
And he misses the crew too. “They’re not just crew, they’re family, they’re friends now.”
There’s talk, he notes, of them doing Comic-Con “to sort of celebrate the prequel show.”
And he’s not ruling out the possibility of an Outlander one-off TV special in the future. “Who knows?” he chuckles. “Who knows? I know they did that with Downton Abbey and others. So you never know. Maybe the ginger wig is still around somewhere.”
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The new 2025-26 season announced by RSC co-artistic directors Evans and Harvey also incudes a musical adaptation of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, based on the memoir by William Kamkwamba written with Bryan Mealer and the 2019 film directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor for Potboiler Productions.
Royal Shakespeare Company poster for ‘The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind Musical’ (Nakano Okparaeke/RSC)
The show’s book and lyrics are by Richy Hughes and music and lyrics by Tim Sutton. The production is being directed by Lynette Linton, formerly artistic director of the Bush Theatre in west London. It runs at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from February 10-March 28.
The production was commissioned by and is presented in association with Kenny Wax Limited and Chuchu Nwagu Productions
