In an interview with Variety, Heughan opened up about how he sees Jamie handling being back with Claire after so long. "There's a lot of challenges to season three — there's a period of time where Jamie and Claire are apart; he thinks that he's lost her, or at least that she's alive and well but in the future, so what is he living for?" he said. "What sort of man is he now? She will eventually return, but they're both older, so what is Jamie, who is the man he's become?" Balfe also touched on the issue of the characters finding each other again, and how it will be hard work for both of them:
"I think what's going to be most exciting is the reunion between Claire and Jamie and them discovering each other again and falling in love all over again. I think both of them have probably held each other up on a pedestal for 20 years, so in many ways, they're going to have to destroy that image first before they can fall in love with the person right in front of them, and that's going to be really interesting. I love the complexity of that, because you can't be in love with a ghost, and Claire is in many ways in love with Jamie's ghost, as Jamie is in love with her ghost, and that's not the people they are when they see each other again."
