The actors of ‘Outlander’, Caitriona Balfe and David Berry, share insights on why Claire and Lord John Grey’s intimate scene was described as “vulnerable,” “raw,” and “beautiful.”

Outlander Season 7 Episode 11 “A Hundredweight of Stones” could be deemed as one of the most challenging parts in the entire Starz series for viewers. Beginning with Claire (Caitriona Balfe) still processing the news of Jamie (Sam Heughan) being lost at sea, the episode also tackles a deeply divisive moment from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels.

“I think people are dreading it, but are probably still really, really interested to see it,” Outlander executive producer Maril Davis told Decider.

**Spoilers for Outlander Season 7 Episode 11 “A Hundredweight of Stones,” now streaming on Starz**

The focal point is the scene featuring a heavily intoxicated Lord John Grey (David Berry) and a similarly inebriated Claire engaging in a sexual encounter. Unlike the romantic and pleasurable encounters typical on Outlander, the intimacy between Lord John Grey and Claire serves as a shared expression of their anguish over losing Jamie.

Discussing the scene, Outlander star Caitriona Balfe remarked, “Yeah, I mean, the sex or whatever, it wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about pleasure. It wasn’t about those kind of things. It was two people in a lot of pain trying to find some kind of solace and not being able to.”

Outlander fans will know that while Claire and Jamie are soulmates, Lord John Grey has nevertheless been truly, madly, deeply in love with the Scotsman since Season 3. As he tries to explain to nephew and ward (and Jamie’s secret son) William Ransom (Charles Vandervaart), Lord John marries Claire as a final act of love to Jamie. Lord John Grey believes that only through marrying Claire can he protect the woman Jamie loved.

So sleeping with Claire wasn’t about love or romance or passion, as much as it was about physically expressing their shared heartbreak.

“We worked really hard with the writers to make sure that we find the right way to do it,” Balfe said. “Then working with David was just really amazing. You know, I definitely needed to lean on him.”

Balfe revealed she also leaned heavily on Vanessa Coffey, Outlander‘s intimacy coach. “Sam and I have been playing Jamie and Claire for so many years that we have such a shorthand and we’ve established that relationship so well. You know, it’s so easy in a way for us to sort of find where they would be and what their emotional state is with each other, but to go into this other place…it’s like a whole new territory,” she explained.

“Look, it’s a difficult thing to say,” Outlander star David Berry said when Decider asked about the controversial sequence. “I think that there was a lot of anticipation and thought beforehand put into what was going to happen in this episode and how we would approach it. And everyone had different expectations and different ideas of have how to move forward with it.”

“I guess the difficulty in portraying that is that these characters do go through this very intense intimacy almost immediately. How do you you ramp up from zero to one hundred like that? And how do you inject a little bit of humanity into it?”

“I hope that we also we end up doing that a little bit in the intimate or the sex scene. I’m not sure we explored that as fully as I perhaps would have liked,” Berry admitted. “But I think that we definitely try to explore it more in the morning after and in the way that they communicate through language and through words and exchanging their ideas.”

Speaking of the morning after, Outlander spends far less time on depicting the actual sex scene than it does the emotional aftermath. In fact, it seems that the real intimate experience Claire and Lord John share is opening up, emotionally, in bed the next day.

“I think any time you have a night where you might wake up the next morning, regret it, you’ve still shared something intimate with someone,” Maril Davis said, “and that can’t help but deepen your connection.”

Balfe said she found that conversation scene, wherein Lord John Grey opens up about his life and his relationship with Manoke, was “beautiful” for the show and for our understanding of the righteous Redcoat character.

“When you’re at your most vulnerable and when you’re at your most raw, sometimes that’s when you can connect the deepest with somebody,” Balfe said. “I think the two of them laying in that bed the next day, there’s all of the pain and all of that is still there, but it’s just stripped back in a very kind of like pure way.”

“I think Lord John Gray has been such a huge character in our show, but doesn’t always get to sort of explain so much about himself..and being able to hear about that kind of sorrow or that side of his life and how he’s always had to hide that side of himself was really beautiful and powerful.”