Producer of Ronald D Moore and his costume designer wife Terry Dresbach reveal how they’ve got Scottish historical drama all sewn up. By

Outlander Bruce Fretts

Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the real-life love story between Ronald D Moore and Terry Dresbach begins and the fictional one they depict on Outlander ends. Moore, executive producer on the TV series about a 1940s British nurse who is transported to 18th-century Scotland, met Dresbach, the show’s costume designer, in 2003, while they were working together on HBO drama Carnivàle. After a long production meeting one day, Moore confessed his feelings to Dresbach.

“I told her when she leaned forward, it was as if the sun came out, and when she leaned back, the sun went away,” Moore recalls.

“I stood up and walked around the desk, and that was the first kiss,” Dresbach says. “We were engaged six weeks later.”

Cut to the pivotal first-series episode of Outlander in which nurse Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) marries the Jacobite warrior Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan). He tells her: “I’ll never forget when I came out of the church and saw you. It was as if I stepped outside on a cloudy day and suddenly the sun came out.”

“When I wrote that, I thought, ‘Wait ‘til Terry reads this,’” Moore says. “It’s a little love letter to her.”

“I started crying,” Dresbach says. “He’s a hopeless romantic.”

Swoonworthy moments like that have helped propel Outlander to rapid success. The recent return of the show in the US drew 1.2 million live viewers, a 69 per cent increase over its debut last summer. In a recent interview at the Manhattan offices of Starz, the cable network that distributes Outlander in the US, Moore and Dresbach – who joined the conversation via telephone from Scotland, where she’s working on the show’s coming second season – discussed the challenges and joys of working together as a couple on a project with such a rabid fan base.

Outlander is based on the first book in Diana Gabaldon’s series of bestselling novels, which have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Gabaldon has written eight books, all of which straddle the genres of historical fiction, romance, fantasy and adventure, and a ninth is on the way. Each volume is expected to be covered by one season of the TV show.

Dresbach’s sublime costumes are a starring attraction. Yet before she and Moore decided to collaborate on the project, she had retired from showbusiness and was spending much of her time helping to bring up his two young children from a previous marriage, as he worked on sci-fi series such as the acclaimed Battlestar Galactica revival.

Still, she couldn’t resist the lure of bringing to life Gabaldon’s novels, which she started to devour soon after the first one was published in 1991. “As Ron kept pointing out, ‘Who the hell else is going to do this

Ronald D Moore and Terry Dresbach outside their home in Doune, main; Moore meets fans of in New York, right