Outlander star Caitriona Balfe steps out of the stone circle and into the ring for The Cut, director Sean Ellis’ psychological sports drama.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly on Friday at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival where the film had its world premiere, Balfe says she “really got into boxing” for the role of Caitlin, the wife and trainer of Orlando Bloom‘s protagonist, known only as The Boxer, in the film.

Was it more fun than putting on a corset as Claire Fraser on Outlander? “Hell yes,” says Balfe. “And it was undoing a lot of the corset damage, I have to say. A decade of wearing a corset has done wonders to my back.”

Described as an exploration of the “wounds that will not heal,” The Cut follows Bloom’s retired fighter and his obsession with getting back into the ring after a nasty cut took him out of commission a decade ago. John Turturro also stars as Boz, a brash trainer not above using every technique — legal or not — to come out on top.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly’s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Bafle wouldn’t categorize herself as a “super boxing fan” per se, but the Irish actress does hail from Ireland, after all, where the sport is massively popular. “I knew quite a lot about various different boxers and the sport and stuff.” Yet “it was only when I signed onto the film and I started taking some boxing lessons and worked with this amazing coach, Ruth Raper,” she says, that the world opened itself up to her.

“You talk to people in the boxing world and it is often —especially [for] working class kids — the sort of one avenue where they go to get out of trouble,” she explains. “They put their energy into that, it keeps them off the streets, keeps them on the straight and narrow. But it’s a single road. It looks after one thing. It’s like, we’re going to take you and put that intensity and all of those energies into something, but it doesn’t really fix the root.”

It’s a path that represents Bloom’s fighter, says Bafle. “He’s found something that’s kept him on the straight and narrow, but it’s just really put the actual problems back in the recesses of his mind,” she notes. “We all know if you repress something, it eventually has to be dealt with. And I think that’s a lot of people in sports. It’s such a single track. It’s like, you can do one thing brilliantly, but sometimes at the expense of dealing with the rest of the things in your life.”

With additional reporting by Gerrad Hall.