As a child, Caitríona Balfe never found it strange when a trip to the dentist or to a clothing store involved driving by British soldiers with machine guns, or having the family car inspected for explosives. There were frequent bomb scares too, around where she grew up in Tydavnet, a small Irish village near the Northern Ireland border, and sometimes on the news she’d hear about a nearby community that had been hit. “It’s such a part of the fabric of your life when you live in those areas,” she says. “It’s really not until you get older that you look back and you realize the craziness of it, or the strangeness of it.”
By then, Balfe was based in New York, and she started to dabble in acting classes. She was dating a guy who lived in Los Angeles and decided to take another leap to a new city full of strangers. “I knew that I had a passion for acting,” she says. “I knew it was something that, if I got the chance to do it, I would attack it with everything I had.” Balfe was aware she was at a disadvantage as a late starter, even at the not-exactly-old age of 29. Still, she began to build a career, commencing with the smallest of roles in J.J. Abrams’s Super 8. “I didn’t speak and I was the dead mom,” she says with a laugh, “but at least I spent a day with J.J. You kind of feel like, Well, if that person who’s really incredible and successful gives you a sort of seal of approval, then maybe that means something.”
The smaller jobs kept coming for a while, but then things dried up. One day, Balfe was standing in a dog park with a friend when her manager called her and dumped her. At that point, she hadn’t worked in five or six months. At first, “He kept telling me, ‘You have to wear the dress and put the makeup on and do the hot-girl thing.’ And it was so not me,” she says. “I’m glad I knew that I wanted to do it with integrity, if that makes any sense.”
Balfe’s conviction began to falter and she considered giving up on acting. When the casting call came along for Outlander, “it was another self-tape among hundreds,” she says. But in 2013 she was cast in the lead role of Claire, a former World War II nurse in Scotland who is transported back to the mid-18th century, where she’s thrown into a group of rebel Highlanders. She falls in love with one of the men, Jamie (played by Sam Heughan). “That feistiness she’s got, maybe it’s the Irishness in her—because she’s got great intelligence and great wit about her—that feistiness really works for Claire,” Heughan says of Balfe. “She’s never going to be told what to do. She’s always going to stand up for herself.”
Outlander allowed Balfe to show off her versatility in a series that requires physical strength, charm, wit, and depth, and the offers sailed in. But because shooting a season of Outlander in Scotland takes between 9 and 12 months, there’s never much time left for her to accept other opportunities. “The beauty of this show is that it’s opened a lot of doors. The tough part about it is that we don’t have any time to really take advantage of it,” says Balfe. She was able to film Jodie Foster’s Money Monster between seasons one and two and starred opposite Christian Bale in the Oscar-nominated Ford v Ferrari between seasons four and five, the latter of which brought her some critical acclaim for elevating what could have been a by-the-numbers “wife” role. Says Ford v Ferrari director James Mangold, “Whatever had been said to me before I met Caitríona—‘She’s in this hot TV show, huge following, former model’—this is often the kind of thing that turns me off. But what I was confronted with was a simply remarkable actress—present, fearless, emotionally vulnerable, and smart.”
