Are The ‘Outlander’ Stars Actually Scottish? Cast’s Real Accents Revealed

“Outlander” Season 5 takes place in colonial America, was filmed in Scotland and has actors from all over the world. Diehard fans know that not all the “Outlander” stars are using their real accents. Much of the Fraser family speaks differently in real life. Most of our favorite “Outlander” actors are, in fact, just acting.

First of all, it should be noted there are real Scots on the Starz time travel drama. Sam Heughan is making his accent a bit heavier when he plays Jamie Fraser, but he is indeed Scottish, having been born in Balmaclellan and raised in New Galloway.

“My accent is…sort of an Edinburgh sort of soft southwest Scottish accent. It could almost be English. So we try to do a bit of a Highland lilt to it,” Heughan told Entertainment Weekly when “Outlander” was just starting in 2014.

Richard Rankin, who plays Roger MacKenzie, is not using his genuine brogue, despite having been born in Scotland. He is from Glasgow, but Roger is from Inverness, which requires him to alter his dialect.

“Probably not very many people would hear the difference between my accent and Roger’s accent. Roger’s Ivernessian so he speaks with an Inverness accent, which is a Highland accent, which is very different from our own, and actually, it was very difficult to adopt that accent,” he told Parade.

Caitriona Balfe plays Claire Fraser, who was raised in England. However, she’s actually Irish. She was born in Dublin and raised in a town called Tydavnet in the northern part of the country.

“She has captured that 1940s way of speaking where the tongue is little bit higher and everything is that a little bit crisper,” Carol Ann Crawford, “Outlander” dialect coach, told The Herald.

Sophie Skelton’s Brianna Fraser MacKenzie was raised in Boston, but Skelton wasn’t born on this side of the pond. The actress is British, born just outside of Manchester, England, in a town called Woodford.

“I did work with an accent coach a couple of weeks prior to starting filming, because we toyed with the idea of giving Brianna a Boston accent, because she’s from Boston, but in the end, we just decided to keep it very general,” Skelton told Assignment X. “She went through a private Catholic school in the ‘60s, and we thought she had that drummed out of her, just to make her a neutral American.”

David Berry was born in Toronto but moved to Australia as a child. He hides his accent from down under by putting on an English lilt when he plays Lord John Grey.

Maria Doyle Kennedy is Irish, but her character Jocasta Cameron was born and raised in Scotland before moving to America.

Meanwhile, her lover, Murtagh Fitzgibbons, has a Scottish brogue, but actor Duncan Lacroix is a London native who has been living in Ireland for several years.

See the cast perfect their accents when “Outlander” Season 5 airs Sundays on Starz.