Before he was melting hearts and slaying redcoats as Outlander’s brooding Highland dreamboat Jamie Fraser, Sam Heughan was just another shaggy-haired teen skulking in the shadowy corners of an Edinburgh bar, nursing a pint of heavy and trying not to get caught.
"I used to sit right there," Sam confided with a smirk, pointing to a well-worn seat during an interview at Wildcat Bar, the current incarnation of what used to be Burlington Bertie’s—his teenage haunt of choice.
"We weren’t exactly ordering old fashioneds. It was more like, ‘one pint, please—and don’t ask for ID.’"
Now 44, the Scottish actor with cheekbones sharp enough to carve haggis was chatting with cocktail maestro Iain McPherson, and the nostalgia was flowing almost as freely as the whisky.
Heughan’s origin story isn’t all stardust and soundstages. Born in tiny Balmaclellan, a village with more sheep than stoplights, Sam was thrust into Edinburgh life at age 12 when his mother enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art.
“We packed up everything—castle ruins, the smell of horses, the works—and moved to the suburbs,” he writes in his memoir Waypoints. “It was like stepping onto a new planet. There were buses. There were people. There were... rules.”
Indeed, Sam recalls his time at James Gillespie’s High School as "a regimented experience in a navy-blue uniform," where even milk cartons could trigger a full-blown drama.
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