Last week's Outlander sex scene between Jamie and Lady Geneva left people with some questions. Specifically, given that Jamie was blackmailed into sex, people wondered if he consented. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Hannah James, who plays Geneva, gave her take on the scene.
"I never felt like he was raped," she said. "I understand other people’s opinion and where they are coming in on it. The way the scene went for us, and the way Toni Graphia wrote it so it is a mutual understanding…yes, I had blackmailed him into coming into my room, but he came of his own free will."
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She believes there were cues in the scene indicating that the sex was consensual. "There is that softening with, 'you can watch me undress,'" she said. "He never had to do that. There is that part where they are coming close and she says, 'I don’t know what to do.' And he says, 'We don’t have to go through with this.' I feel like the power or the roles reverse a bit and they come onto even ground where she knows that he is giving her something that she wants and can never have, and maybe she’s giving him something he’s missed for such a long time."
James added that she was "thrilled" that the scene departed from the book, where Geneva said "stop" and Jamie ignored her. To the contrary, he asked her multiple times on the show if she wanted to continue.
Outlander actor Tobias Menzies said on set that while sexual violence figures prominently in the books, he knows people watching the show might take issue with it. "We've tried as much as possible to try so it comes out of drama," she explained. "So, it doesn't feel too titillating. You have to include sexual violence in that spectrum. There's lots of different types of sex on the show, and some of it is violent."