Not long after being announced as Isaac Grant in Outlander: Blood of My Blood, Brian McCardie unexpectedly passed away, as ClaireandJamie.com previously announced. We now know that the actor will be honored in the series, and his role will not be recast.
When McCardie passed away, he hadn’t filmed all of his scenes in Outlander: Blood of My Blood. As the patriarch of the Grant family, and therefore the laird of the clan, he would have a big role in working with the MacKenzies to form a marriage alliance between his son Malcolm and the eldest MacKenzie daughter, Ellen.
There would have been more for Isaac if Outlander: Blood of My Blood season 2 happened
It’s clear that Outlander: Blood of My Blood isn’t billed as a limited series, and there is hope that a second season will happen. Should that have been the case with McCardie still around, Isaac would have gained a much bigger storyline, according to Entertainment Weekly. Matthew B. Roberts shared that Issac is a “powerful character,” and he commands more to his story.
In many cases, this would often mean that a character would be recast. We just have to look at how the Harry Potter movies had to recast Albus Dumbledore, and Lance Reddick was recast as Zeus in the Disney+ Percy Jackson series after his untimely death. However, Outlander: Blood of My Blood didn’t want to go that route.
It could have certainly been different had McCardie have been cast as a much more bigger role in Ellen and Brian’s love story. As it stands, Isaac is one of those characters who isn’t even mentioned in the original books or the first season of the series, so this role was crafted for Outlander: Blood of My Blood.
A new character was created for the Outlander prequel
Roberts and Maril Davis shared that they wanted to honor the work that McCardie had done. So, rather than deal with reshoots after a recast, they decided to get back to the drawing board and create a whole new character. That means we won’t see Malcolm Grant suddenly take on the role that Isaac would have had.
"The one thing we wanted to do after we took a beat to grieve was decide that we want to preserve his work. We don't want to recast and reshoot. We want to preserve that."
It isn’t going to be the exact same storyline as was originally planned. That would be hard to do when it came to replacing the laird of a clan, especially the other offshoot of the Lord Lovat line. There are no details of who this new character is and no casting has been announced for it.
Outlander: Blood of My Blood will premiere on Friday, Aug. 8 on STARZ.
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