Lives go by in tandem. We come, we see, we conquer. History repeats and rhymes in dissonant harmony. An actor maintains two distinct personas while portraying a character over an extended period of time. It's a lucky coincidence when aspects of their lives become intertwined mirror images.

French actor César Domboy found oneness in Ronald D. Moore's television universe, which is also the setting of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, the final season of which airs on Starz through early May. Outlander is a complex tale following Claire Randall (played by Caitríona Balfe), a nurse in WWII in the 1940s, as she travels through time to Scotland in the 1740s, in the years leading up to the Jacobite uprisings.

Domboy joined the sprawling historical fantasy epic in 2016 when he was cast as Fergus Fraser, the now fan-favorite adopted son of central romantic time-traveling dyad Claire and Jamie (Sam Heughan). He's reprising his role after a two-year hiatus, returning for the series's eighth installment.

Domboy meets me over Zoom, sitting in his Paris apartment one day before his 36th birthday. He tells me he has just returned from the Outlander season premiere in New York that took place the previous weekend, and he's enjoying a moment of peace and quiet—possibly the last he'll see for a few months—before the rest of the show airs.

"I'm in this in-between," he tells me, grinning. "I like having nothing to do."

Outlander's final season premiere proved a culmination of a decade of work for Domboy. Over the years, the role has become more than just a character he returns to; Fergus has marked time alongside Domboy, each new chapter in the series folding into a different chapter of his own life. By the final premiere, that long relationship seemed to crystallize into something rare: the sense of having grown up inside a story while helping it grow around you.

"It was deep," Domboy tells me. "It's already deeply nostalgic, but it's also such a nice feeling, you know? It's like our last family reunion, and it's the final chapter of it. It feels like I've belonged to something that mattered to so many people, and that's just so nice."

Domboy has witnessed his and Fergus's growth over the course of their journey through Outlander's time-bending plots and lush Scottish countryside. His work prior to and during Outlander has primarily existed in the French cinema and television world, from his 2013 stint as Guy de Leval on Borgia to his turn opposite model Camille Rowe in the 2022 Netflix film No Limit. Much of the French actor's growth has revolved around his confidence in navigating an English-speaking world.

"When I started, I was like Bambi on ice, you know?" he says. "Ten years ago, we wouldn't have been able to have this conversation in English."

Now, with the fifth season of his wildly popular English-language television series under his belt, Domboy is more realized, more readied, and more assured than ever before. In that way, he muses, he and Fergus are the same.

"Now, I feel more in control of my craft," he says. "But it's also the journey of Fergus, where he gets to build himself up and to become more whole and more equipped as a person through the seasons."

That convergence has followed him across the series in other ways, too. Domboy joined Outlander in its third season, stepping into a machine that was already fully in motion. It was, he says, "very intimidating." Yet the transition mirrored Fergus's own story almost too neatly to ignore: just as Jamie and Claire once took in a younger Fergus, the cast took Domboy in with similar ease. "They adopted me and welcomed me into the family so quickly," he says. At his first read-through, watching Balfe and Heughan at the far end of the table, he felt half like an actor and half like a viewer who had somehow wandered into his own television screen. Then the rhythm of production took over. The set, he says, was so well-oiled that he felt part of it almost immediately.

Domboy's route to television stardom began on something like an adolescent impulse. As a teenager, he felt less pulled toward one fixed ambition than toward the pleasure of invention itself—the possibility of slipping into different lives, different worlds, different selves. Acting became the natural answer.

He recalls that early period with a kind of sheepish charm: "I started doing theater and theater school, just for fun," he says. "It wasn't like, I didn't think about being professional when I was younger, then it became possible. And I thought, 'All right, that's cool.'"

Off set, Domboy's imagination moves by similar increments—through observation, texture, accident. Inspiration does not arrive only through obvious beauty. It can come from ordinary life, from what he calls a kind of Martin Parr sensibility: an ice cream on the beach, a friend laughing at a restaurant, the beam of light that hits a table at exactly the right moment. He loves taking photographs. He talks about images the way some people talk about memories, as small proofs that meaning appears most readily when no one is straining for it.

So what does the star of the hit time-traveling show have planned for the future? Domboy says he has since returned to France for several new projects, including a forthcoming series about a religious cult directed by Ziad Doueiri. There is more on the horizon, too: another television project, he says, with French actress Megan Northam. He names people he admires—Yorgos Lanthimos, Chloé Zhao, Xavier Dolan—but resists becoming too fixed in his ambitions. Life, after all, has already outpaced whatever plans he once had for it.

"I would be crazy to be too uptight now regarding what happened to me in the last 15 years," he says. "I could never have predicted what my life would have been like, and I wouldn't change what happened to me for anything in the world. And it wasn't what was planned, you know?"

That may be the final parallel Outlander leaves him with. Fergus has spent years adapting to upheaval, improvising a self across loss, love, exile, fatherhood, and survival. Domboy, in his own way, has done something similar: moving between languages, countries, roles, and versions of himself, growing steadier as the character grew fuller. By the end of our conversation, he seems both nostalgic and unburdened, standing in the brief, strange pause between a decade-long ending and whatever begins after it. For now, he is content to remain there a little longer—in that in-between, in that last sliver of stillness, where one line closes and another prepares to begin.

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Photographed by Alvin Kean Wong

Written by Abby Shewmaker