We’ve been waiting months and months for Outlander to cast Roger and Brianna. We’ve still heard no news regarding the daughter of Claire and Jamie, as Starz is milking the potential news for all its worth, because obviously. On the bright side, today the network announced that Outlander has found its Roger Wakefield and he has the perfect look for the gig. Scottish actor Richard Rankin has been signed on for the big role. You can check him out, below.
That’s a still of Rankin from The Crimson Field, which is about WWI, so he definitely has experience playing a character from the past. Outlander’s Claire Frasier was a nurse in the second World War before traveling through time on the hit series. In Outlander, Richard Rankin will play a character from a later generation than Claire. If you’ve read the books by Diana Gabaldon, you already know Roger Wakefield is the adopted son of Reverend Wakefield. The network also reports that Wakefield will be at Oxford once again, teaching history there. Presumably, the actor also has some singing talent. In Season 2, we’ll meet Roger as an adult, although Starz is still being murky regarding the details of exactly what will happen to bring Roger back.
Now, we’re about to get into major books spoilers beyond what Starz is willing to share with us, so if you want Outlander Season 2 to be unspoiled, head out now. While we left Claire in Scotland, eventually she’ll travel back to the present day in order to give her future daughter a better life. Once her daughter Brianna is an adult, Claire will return back to Scotland with her daughter to revisit the area where she first time traveled, and there they will meet a grown-up Roger Wakefield.
While the second book in the series, Dragonfly in Amber, actually kicks off with this moment, that doesn’t seem as if it will be happening in Season 2. Instead, reports indicate that Outlander’s story will remain a bit more linear at the beginning, and all of the footage we’ve seen so far from the new episodes shows Claire and Jamie picking up right where Season 1 left off, and heading to Paris in order to hopefully stop the Jacobite revolution in its tracks. Eventually, the show will need to jump back to the future in order for the narrative frame of the rest of the novels to work for TV, but changing around the structure of the series should theoretically work out well.
Brianna and Roger are—by far—the biggest castings Season 2 is expecting to sign on, and we’re happy Richard Rankin seems to fit the part. Presumably since the Roger news has now come down the pipeline, Brianna will also be signed on to the series soon. Outlander has also added the likes of Master Raymond and young Lord John Grey in recent months.
Outlander is expected to return in the spring of 2016, although Starz hasn’t announced an official premiere date, yet. While the subscription cable network bides its time, you can check out what is coming up this winter.
