One Nightstand With Caitríona Balfe

There’s nothing like an absence of screens to turn you into a reader. “When I was growing up, for a long time, we didn’t have TV,” says Irish actor Caitríona Balfe. “So our thing would be to go to the library every week, and you would get your stack of three or four books, and then that would be sort of what you did as entertainment.”

The 46-year-old’s reading habit has endured, though she now finds herself not only in possession of a television, but also on one of its most beloved shows: Outlander, adapted by Starz from Diana Gabaldon’s book series. Balfe has spent more than a decade working as the spunky time-traveling Claire, opposite Sam Heughan, with the show’s eighth and final season now airing.

“It’s been a huge part of my life,” she says of the series, which she began filming in 2013. “When we wrapped [filming in 2024], a quarter of my life had been on the show. It was the most amazing, amazing journey.” The show developed a deeply dedicated fandom during that period, driven by the swashbuckling romance, historical scope, and much-discussed intimate moments. On the latter, Balfe is effusive about the partner she found in Heughan. “We were always in step with how we wanted to portray this couple,” she says. “It was very important for us that it didn’t become gratuitous and that it wasn’t just about feeding an audience what they think they want, but more what’s going to move them.”

Nevertheless, she says there are pressures when it comes to the more physical scenes. “They come from the studio, or they come from the audience, and you’re an actor — you’re a human being — it’s not my first thing that I want to do, take my clothes off. And so it became an interesting challenge to be like ‘We want to show you a really honest relationship.’”

The more physical scenes were created without the support of an intimacy coordinator until Vanessa Coffey joined the show after Season 5. “I wish we’d had [one],” says Balfe of the intimacy coordinator role, which primarily gained popularity following the #MeToo reckoning in 2017. “I think we learned along the way some of the pitfalls. I was so lucky that both Sam and Tobias [Menzies] — and Sam and Tobias can say that because they had scenes together too — that we were all such good friends and were able to look out for each other. But in the beginning, it was not always knowing what was being filmed, how it was being filmed, and then later on you’re just watching screenshots and memes and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, my poor parents.’ And you learn the hard way, maybe, how to protect yourself a bit more.”

Outside of television, Balfe has amassed a career of thoughtfully selected film projects that showcase her depth as an actor. She starred opposite Matt Damon and Christian Bale in the Oscar-winning Ford v Ferrari, while her performance in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast earned her both Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. Next up, she has an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility in which she plays Mrs. Dashwood opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones — a role she was nervous to take on, given how well-known the material is. A conversation with director Georgia Oakley sealed the deal.

“When I heard she was doing it, I was like, ‘Oh, OK, that’s interesting. I’ll have a conversation with her,’” she says. “And when we spoke, she just had this really beautiful take on it. I think it’s going to be very different visually. I think prior versions, even though they were destitute, they still lived in this insanely stately home, and I think she’s just sort of made it all a bit more grounded. You really see that they’ve lost things, to an extent. And I know it’s a love story really between the sisters, which I think was so beautiful.”

Keep reading to discover four of Balfe’s favorite books — one of which has a connection to a forthcoming literary-adjacent project in which Balfe will star.

Her first choice is Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy, a book about an Irish mother’s struggles in the early days of motherhood. “I read this when my son was probably about 2, and I remember distinctly sitting in bed and just like my heart being in my throat and sort of being scared by it and scared by stuff that I could relate to in it,” she says. “And then also being slightly like, ‘Oh, thank God it isn’t as bad as that for me.’”

The book, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2024, also helped Balfe contend with the “grief” of motherhood. “That’s something that people don’t really explain to you when you’re about to become a parent, that there is a grieving for the person that you were,” she says. “It wasn’t easy for me to have a kid, so I was in this place where I was like, ‘I have to be so grateful,’ but also then you get hit by these waves of these other emotions and I just hadn’t been able to articulate it. And then when I read that, I was just floored by it.”

The book also shaped how she thinks about raising her son. “He’s just this pure little vessel and he’s got so much empathy and so much kindness, and that’s all there,” she says. “And it’s like, well, how do we stop this society changing him and making him something that’s not what he already is? I do wrestle with that, because there comes a time when your influence as a parent gets taken over by their peer group.”

Her second selection is Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. “I had actually optioned a previous book he had done, a beautiful book called Grace, and so I was aware of him as an author,” says Balfe. “So when Prophet Song came out, I was like, ‘Oh, I must get Paul’s new book,’ totally unprepared for what was between its pages.”

Prophet Song tells the story of a family broken apart as Ireland slips into totalitarianism. “It really shows how easy it can be for the world around you to change, and while you’re trying to just survive within your own little world, you can miss things,” she says. “We are so blinded by our own self-importance in a way as a Western democracy because we look at ourselves as this kind of paragon of evolution and how well we have sorted things out, but why shouldn’t it happen to us just as easily as it happens to anybody else? It’s such a powerful way of getting us to look at the plight of refugees, the fall of civilizations, the fall of society.”

Balfe first read her third choice, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, 20 years ago, but she recently picked it up again to prepare for her role in The Housekeeper, which dramatizes du Maurier’s possible inspiration for the book. “I read it in a very different way this time, because now I’m looking at it and reading it through this prism of what was Daphne du Maurier’s inspiration and who she is as a person, how that influenced all of the characters she wrote,” she says.

The movie, which stars Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Laird, and Anthony Hopkins, imagines du Maurier arriving at the historic manor of a widowed British lord, then falling into a romantic entanglement with the housekeeper, played by Balfe. “It’s sort of like I play a version of Mrs. Danvers, but it’s very different from the book Mrs. Danvers,” she adds. “It’s based on a novella that Rose Tremain wrote, and she has expanded that to a novel, which is coming out this year. I’ve read that as well, which is really so good.”

Her final book, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, won the 2024 Booker Prize and tells the story of life aboard the International Space Station. “I’ve gifted it more than any other book,” Balfe says. “I’ve probably given it to about 10 people.” She took the novel on a family holiday to Mexico and fell in love with it. “It’s the kind of book where you read a page, and then you find that you’ve been daydreaming for over 10 minutes and you’re like, ‘Oh, God,’” she says. “It totally arrested me.”

She continues: “I don’t know if this thing happens to you when you fly, but how emotional you get watching films or reading in the air. I think there’s something about that disconnect from being on the Earth and on the ground that puts you into this fragile, emotional state.

“If you’re like that in an airplane, can you imagine what that must be like when you are orbiting in a space station?”

Watch the full episode below.