THE ESSENTIALS: CAITRIONA BALFE ON THE ROLES THAT LED HER TO BELFAST

THE BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS CONTENDER COMPARES HER WORK AS BELFAST’S MA TO HER BREAKOUT ROLE IN STARZ'S OUTLANDER.

THE NOMINEE: CAITRÍONA BALFE

She swears it’s unintentional, but Caitríona Balfe has found a niche in playing strong-willed and opinionated women. She’s known to TV audiences for her work on Starz’s Outlander, playing the smart and outspoken time-traveling Claire Fraser, a medic with a strong knowledge of history. (Penicillin — what a concept!) As Mollie Miles in Academy Awards–nominated drama Ford v Ferrari, she had a need for speed almost as strong as her race car–driver husband (played by Christian Bale). And in this year’s Belfast, she plays Ma — the mother of two boys and the backbone of a working-class Northern Irish family who always looks stylish whether she’s hiding from the rent man or cutting a rug at a Sunday party with the extended family.

Balfe says it’s a “lovely gift” as an actor and as a woman to see a character be a mother and be a wife, but also “an individual who has these quirks and also these fears.” This character is particularly special because she’s based on writer-director Kenneth Branagh’s memories of his own childhood.

“This is something Ken spoke about: his mom had a sort of ‘fizziness’ to her,” Balfe says. “She had a vibrancy. And loved to dance; loved to sing. She loved her fashion. And these were all parts of her that lived very strongly even though she was going through all these stresses and strains.”

The film is known for its music choices, be it native son Van Morrison’s songs cuing certain scenes or a cover of Robert King’s “Everlasting Love” at a pivotal moment at the end where Balfe particularly sparkles.

Balfe, who is Irish, tells Rotten Tomatoes of Belfast that “there’s something extra special about telling a story from home.”

“In the beginning [of filming], we all felt that it was a very specific story about Belfast, about Northern Ireland, and about the Irish experience,” she says. “But obviously, what we’ve discovered within that is this message about kindness, the love of family, and the love of community — and tolerance, which is hugely important.”

“Nowadays, especially, we’ve all lived through the experience of what happens when tribalism is allowed to erupt over into violence,” she says. “And when communities are separated and split like that, it is incredibly difficult to reunite them or to overcome those differences or those grievances.”

The theme of tribalism and violence appears in her Golden Globe–nominated work in Starz’s historical romantic drama Outlander. Based on Diana Gabaldon’s best-selling novels, Balfe plays Claire, an outspoken World War II nurse who travels through time to 1700s Scotland and falls for Highland warrior Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan). Complicating the matter is that her original husband from before her time traveling, Tobias Menzies’ Frank, is the descendant of (and looks just like!) nefarious British army officer Jonathan Wolverton “Black Jack” Randall.

Throughout the Ronald D. Moore–created show (which premieres its sixth season on March 6), Claire has seen plenty of bloodshed in the name of god and country. She’s tried to thwart the Jacobite Rising and help Africans enslaved by American plantation owners and is a participant in the dawning of the American Revolutionary War.

Balfe says Ma and Claire differ. For the former, “it’s very difficult for her to imagine anything beyond” Belfast, which is “the complete opposite to Claire — thrusting herself into the unknown is very much the backbone of her character.”

Claire can teleport through time but she doesn’t remain the same age throughout the show. Over the seasons, Balfe’s character aesthetic has included age makeup and wigs with grey streaks — not things you normally see in a romance story.

“One of the great things that Diana chose to explore is the enduring love of a marriage,” Balfe says.”This love story, more or less starts with them getting married, and then we follow their journey of how they stay together.”

She says it’s “been incredible…to inhabit this vastness of a woman’s experience in that way” and go from “a woman from her early 30s, and she’s now getting close to 60.

“I made a decision that Claire was going through menopause last year,” she says. “Because it helped feed into a lot of her insecurities as a woman because she’d always been someone who’s had unwavering confidence.”

To that note, Outlander has always been groundbreaking for its take on the female gaze when it comes to its intimate sex scenes. That hasn’t stopped as Claire and Jamie have aged, and Balfe says that “we’re telling the story of a woman in her late 50s who still has an active sex life and is still a sexual being.

“I do think it’s an important thing to look at a woman and her sexual appetite and her desires and all these things and allow her to fo feel these things unapologetically,” Balfe says. “Instead of just being the object or the recipient of things, she’s an active pursuer.”