ED SPELEERS WANTS TO BE HATED—FOR THE RIGHT REASONS

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Unlike most actors, Ed Speleers is not afraid of getting booed. As Stephen Bonnet, the villain of the new season of the Starz hit Outlander, he makes a memorable entrance escaping from a public hanging before taking advantage of the compassion of the beloved central couple Claire and Jamie, newly arrived in America, robbing them of their valuables after they’ve promised not to turn him in. Given the show’s passionate fanbase, Speleers is bracing himself for indignation. “I’m up for being disliked and hated if it’s in the right context,” he laughs. “The beauty of this piece is that it has such huge fans and I think if they vehemently detest the screen version of Stephen Bonnet, then I’ve done my job. So I’m aiming to be disliked by the fans, but hopefully for the right reasons.”

The thirty-year-old Speleers is joining the show, based on the popular novels by Diana Gabaldon, in its fourth season, with its time-traveling romance well established. Claire, played by Caitriona Balfe, is a World War II nurse who has suddenly found herself in Scotland in 1743, where she eventually falls in love with Sam Heughan’s Jamie. Over the years, they have made their way to the American colonies, where they first encounter Speleers’s Stephen. Some might pale at the thought of joining a massive fan favorite halfway through—and especially as the antagonist—but Speleers is quick to point out the virtues. “The beauty of getting a role that has huge books written about it is there’s a lot to sink your teeth into,” he explains, “to try and extract from both other seasons and the novels themselves. There’s a rich tapestry of character description embedded in all these books, which is a great source material which you don’t always have. If you’re joining halfway through, you get to see what the tone of the piece is and I think that’s an advantage.”

Apart from immersing himself in the original novels and the first three seasons, Speleers found his way to Stephen in more distinctly evocative ways. “I’d never been to Ireland and he’s originally from Sligo in the northwest of the Republic of Ireland so I wanted to go and check it all out,” the English actor recalls. “I took my old man with me and we went on a road trip around Ireland, frequenting various pubs and taverns and drinking a lot of Guinness and talking to a lot of people.” Then, as he does with every role, he put together a playlist that he thought reflected his character’s spirit. He played Van Morrison and the Rolling Stones and the electronic jazz act St Germain on repeat but says Oasis’s “Cigarettes and Alcohol” and the Verve’s “Lucky Man” were particularly important touchstones, reflecting Stephen’s loucheness and his obsession with fate. “That became quite a pertinent song,” he laughs of the latter. “Every morning, wherever I would be getting ready to finally leave for work, that would be on—probably much to the dismay of the rest of the hotel guests, because I’m very bad at playing music quietly.”

Stephen’s story may take place in the eighteenth century, but—as Outlander has since the beginning—the show bristles with contemporary relevance. Speleers ties his fascination with Stephen to the legacy of English colonialism on Ireland’s more recent Troubles and America’s continuing racial divide, for example, while Claire’s revulsion to the practice of slavery reflects powerfully on today’s continuing inequalities. “If you look at what’s going on globally, at the moment tensions are very high within the modern democratic world,” he explains. “One great thing about that is that everyone is talking politics, but it’s unearthing a lot of tension and it feels like we are regressing a little bit. Maybe you have to do that in order to move forward, but there is an element of racism that seems to be at the forefront on a similar level as it was in a previous era. I think our show is fairly pertinent because it is covering all these issues when they began in the Americas and history is showing us that it repeats itself when we don’t learn from our mistakes. Bigots dress up differently now, but at the same time we still have all these same problems and we still keep hating each other.”

A decade into his career, Speleers may be best known for his period work—Downton Abbey and Wolf Hall are among his other career highlights—but he had his remarkable start in fantasy, in the title role of the 2006 dragon epic Eragon, which he filmed when he was seventeen after being sent to the audition by his high school drama teacher. “I had two auditions to play the lead and the next thing I knew I landed it and I had to be taken out of school and flown off to Eastern Europe,” he recalls. “I was there for about six months and it was a rollercoaster, a huge catapult of a start to a career.” He speaks candidly about the difficulties that followed, admitting that he succumbed to the expected foibles of a teenager making his way alone through Hollywood off the back of a major studio blockbuster. “You think you know the world at eighteen, but you don’t really have a clue,” he says. “If you’re on a hundred-million-dollar-plus movie, you have a very jarring perception of the world. Some people handle it brilliantly and some people get their head down and work, but I just didn’t. I kind of went off the rails. It’s a bit clichéd, but I did.”

After a period of “dicking about,” Speleers eventually found his way back to what he admits has been a lifelong love. “I can never tell if it sounds wanky or not,” he laughs, “but I have genuinely wanted to do it since I was a very young boy.” In 2011, he starred in the crime thriller A Lonely Place to Die as a mountaineer who discovers a kidnapped girl being held for ransom in the Scottish Highlands, an experience that he says helped him “reset” and become confident in his acting again. “It took a long time to calm back down and work out that actually if I wanted to have this sort of career, if I wanted to act, I’ve got to work my fucking ass off,” he admits. “Gradually, bit by bit, I started to chip away at things and I actually just enjoyed the work more than anything else. I think that’s one of the fundamentals—you’ve got to enjoy what you do, otherwise there’s no point doing it.”

Speleers’s reinvention continued in 2012, when he joined the cross-Atlantic sensation Downton Abbey as the ambitious and flirtatious footman Jimmy Kent, an experience he likens to the drama school to which he never went. “You’re surrounded by heavyweights on both sides of the camera and you could not do anything but learn there,” he explains of his three seasons on the series, which he quickly followed up by diving even further back into British history with the television adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s celebrated Thomas Cromwell epic Wolf Hall. “That was a moment where I got the confidence to go, ‘Ok, I’m capable of booking work on a certain level, so the hard work is paying off,’” he recalls of Downton. “That was a turning point in starting to get work that I felt was of a certain caliber that I wanted to be at. As an actor, you want to be out doing the work.”

Speleers has spent most of the past few months stretching himself in an entirely different direction, starring in the British touring production of Rain Man in Tom Cruise’s role as his professional stage début. “Because I never went to drama school and the normal route is drama school then into theater, to have gotten to the age of thirty and not have done a play, I wondered if I was ever going to get over that hurdle,” he admits. Revealing new layers of a classic character, Speleers says that, rather than the selfish Charlie Babbitt of the film, he focused on his pain as a young man who was abandoned by his father soon after the death of his mother. “His egotism and his self-centered nature have always been addressed, but I think a lot of that comes from a place of hurting,” he explains. “He was actually struggling and going through a lot of pain and the anger in the early part of the play is more deep-rooted in a deeply unhappy individual.”

With the tour finished, Speleers is ready to enjoy the holidays at home with his family and a “fair amount of red wing and Guinness,” although he is quick to emphasize that he is “not one to rest on my laurels for too long.” To that end, he’s at work on a new short film with his production company Dark Glass Films (its first short, “Wale,” was shortlisted for an Oscar today) that he hopes to film in January and looking for his next project, thoroughly reenergized by his last one. “I feel like a big creative weight has been lifted off, as well as it being a hugely rewarding experience,” he says of Rain Man. “When I say that the weight’s been lifted, it’s a case of knowing that you can do it. I hadn’t done anything like that since I was at school and by doing it professionally for three months, eight shows a week, I remembered how much I loved being on the stage and playing off the energy that the audience gives you. It was an unbelievable experience and one that I will treasure—and one that I will not necessarily want to replicate, because you can’t replicate each thing creatively, but certainly I want to do more. It’s left me wanting more, which I guess is a good way to feel about any job really.”

Outlander continues on Sundays on Starz and is available on the Starz app.