Daily Inspiration Quote by Catherine McCormack

“Obviously” is doing suspiciously heavy lifting here. Catherine McCormack’s line has the practiced half-shrug of an actor who’s been asked to account for history on a soundstage: yes, it happened “the way it happened,” and also no, not quite. The phrase functions like a pressure valve, releasing the tension between an audience that wants period drama to feel true and a production process that can’t resist sanding down the messy parts.

Her follow-up, “liberties were taken,” is the industry’s polite euphemism for reshaping the past into something legible, pacey, and emotionally coherent. It’s not an apology so much as a boundary-setting move: don’t treat the show as a textbook; treat it as a story with a budget, a runtime, and an arc. McCormack is signaling awareness of the bargain viewers make when they watch a “based on” narrative: you get the aura of authenticity, the costumes and names, in exchange for compression, invention, and the occasional anachronistic motivation that plays better in close-up.

The subtext is also defensive in a savvy way. By framing the divergence as “obvious,” she implies that anyone expecting strict fidelity is willfully misunderstanding the genre. It’s a neat rhetorical pivot that protects the creative team while acknowledging the historian in the room. This is the actor’s version of telling us: the past is real, but the product is the present.