Richard Rankin
Richard Rankin is INFP. The Scottish actor plays Roger MacKenzie across seasons two through eight of Outlander. Outside acting he is a serious amateur photographer - a solitary, observational pursuit that fits the INFP's relationship to the world. He is thoughtful and quietly spoken in interviews, engaged with the emotional interior of his characters rather than their surface presentation.
Richard Rankin and the INFP Mind
Richard Rankin is INFP. The type is defined by a hierarchy of cognitive functions - not a checklist of traits but an ordered stack of mental processes that determines how someone perceives the world and how they make decisions. For Richard Rankin, that stack leads with Fi (Introverted Feeling) and is supported by Ne (Extraverted Intuition). Understanding that order explains not just what Richard Rankin does but why - and why they respond the way they do under pressure, in relationships, and at the turning points of their arc.
Richard Rankin's inner life is the primary reality. Fi (Introverted Feeling) is the dominant function - a deeply personal value system that Richard Rankin uses to evaluate everything, quietly and constantly. It is not visible on the surface, which is why Richard Rankin is often misread as passive or vague: the intensity is entirely internal. Ne (Extraverted Intuition) as the auxiliary generates the possibilities, connections, and alternative framings that allow Richard Rankin to imagine how things could be rather than just how they are. The inferior Te (Extraverted Thinking) is the consistent weak point: execution, structure, external accountability, and the translation of the interior vision into concrete outcomes are where Richard Rankin loses ground and where growth, when it comes, is most visible.
What makes Richard Rankin a compelling example of INFP is not that they demonstrate every item on the type description, but that the function stack holds under pressure. In the moments that define their story in Actor (Outlander, Burnistoun) - the decisions under stress, the failures of judgment, the rare moments of genuine growth - the pattern is consistent. The dominant function is what Richard Rankin reaches for first. The inferior function is what catches them off guard.
How INFP Processes the World
Every INFP operates through the same hierarchy of cognitive functions. Here is how that stack maps onto how Richard Rankin actually thinks, decides, and acts.
Richard Rankin: What the INFP Profile Explains
Richard Rankin did not go straight from school to drama school. He studied engineering at university and worked as an engineer before following acting, which he had been drawn to since childhood. The INFP's most characteristic vocational story is the one where the institutional path and the interior path diverge early, and the interior path eventually produces enough pressure that the institutional path is abandoned. He spent years as an engineer while the interior assessment of where the vocation lay ran in parallel and eventually prevailed. He trained, found work in Scottish television and theatre, built a career slowly, and arrived at Roger MacKenzie in Outlander in his mid-thirties after a decade of professional acting.
The Roger MacKenzie arc across six seasons of Outlander is an INFP writing the INFP's most characteristic story without being aware of it: the historian who ends up inhabiting the history he studied, the singer who finds his vocation in an eighteenth-century community that needs exactly what he has spent his life preparing to offer, the man whose values are tested by damage that should have broken them and do not. Rankin plays this with a quality of interior truth that is difficult to fake - the specific texture of a person whose most important convictions are not available for strategic revision, whose most significant processing happens in private and surfaces only when the situation extracts it. The type plays the type, and the result is the most emotionally coherent character arc in the series.
His photography is the public window into what the INFP does between professional demands. He is a serious amateur photographer - the camera pointed at landscapes, at the specific physical reality of the Scottish Highlands and wherever else the work takes him. This is not the photography of someone building a social media presence. It is the documentation of what the interior finds significant in the passing present, which is the Introvert's most natural relationship to the visual world.
Richard Rankin: INFP Letter by Letter
Rankin is one of the quieter members of Outlander's main cast in terms of public presence. He does what the promotional work requires, engages genuinely when he engages, and maintains a personal life that is substantially his own. His photography is the most visible window into the private interior - the specific places, the specific quality of light, the specific moments the camera records before they pass. This is not the social media photography of someone curating a public persona. It is the documentation of what the interior finds significant in the passing present, which is the Introvert's most natural relationship to the visual world.
His most revealing interviews are the ones about Roger's interior rather than about Rankin's own. He talks about Roger's processing with a specificity and empathy that suggests genuine identification rather than professional research. The interior work of understanding Roger - what Roger feels, what Roger's damage actually costs, what Roger's faith means to him before and after the hanging - is described with the fluency of someone who has lived alongside that interior rather than studied it from outside. The INFP understands other people's interiors by finding what in their own interior corresponds. Rankin's access to Roger's interior is the most reliable indicator of the type.
His photography consistently finds the angle that the obvious reading of the scene would miss. The images he shares show the quality that distinguishes iNtuitive visual thinking from Sensing visual thinking: the Sensing photographer records what is actually there with precision and care; the iNtuitive photographer finds the implication, the connection, the thing the scene is about rather than the thing the scene contains. His images tend toward atmosphere and suggestion rather than documentation. The Ne finds what the visible moment implies about the invisible one.
His approach to Roger's arc across multiple seasons shows the same orientation. He tracks the character's development not season by season as a series of discrete performances but as a continuous interior arc with implications running forward and backward simultaneously. He talks about what Roger's experience in one season means for who Roger becomes in the next - the Ne finding the pattern that connects the discontinuous moments into a coherent internal logic. This is the iNtuitive actor's most characteristic professional quality: they play the arc rather than the scene, and the scene work is coherent because the arc is understood.
Everything Rankin has built professionally traces back to values the Fi assessed as primary. The switch from engineering to acting was a Fi decision - the engineering satisfied some requirements and not the one that mattered most, which was the specific quality of interior engagement that performing provides. The photography is a Fi practice - it records what the function has assessed as worth keeping. His approach to Roger is Fi-driven: he identifies what Roger values and what those values cost and what surviving the cost does to the values, and the performance is the delivery of that identification.
His most affecting scenes in Outlander are the ones where Roger's Fi is under maximum pressure - after the hanging, in his relationship with Jem, in the development of his faith. Rankin plays these with a specific quality of interior truth that is difficult to produce through technique alone. The feeling is present before the expression arrives, which is what Fi-primary performances look like: the interior state is real and the exterior catches up to it rather than producing it. He consistently acts from inside out.
He took the long route. Engineering degree, years of engineering work, late entry into professional acting, a decade of building the career before Outlander arrived. The INFP does not build institutional frameworks for the vocation before the vocation is certain. It follows the interior assessment and builds the external structure as the assessment clarifies. Rankin built the external structure in response to what the interior was already certain about. The P-disposition builds in response to what the present produces rather than from a prior blueprint.
His relationship to public life shows the same quality. He does not manage his presence strategically or build his profile according to a plan. He does the work, shares what the photography produces, does the press the project requires, and lets the rest be. His profile is lower than his talent and recognition would justify if he were actively managing it. He is not actively managing it. He is doing the work, and the profile is what the work produces.
Why Richard Rankin Is INFP, Not ISFP or INFJ
Rankin is sometimes typed ENFP because of the warmth he projects in press appearances and the range of interests that emerge in interviews. The ENFP case rests on Ne dominance: the external world is the generator, and the interior responds to what the world produces. Rankin's direction runs the other way. The interior assessment is primary. The photography, the engineering, the acting - these are domains the Fi designated as mattering before the exterior world offered them as opportunities. He is not following what the world offers. He is following what the interior has assessed as the correct direction and finding the world's offerings that serve that assessment. That inside-out direction is INFP.
INFJ is argued because of the apparent private depth and the sense of a man operating from an interior vision. The distinction is the function that leads: INFJ's Ni produces a comprehensive synthesising framework about where things are heading and what they mean. Rankin does not give interviews that suggest this kind of synthetic vision. He gives interviews about specific experiences - the specific role, the specific preparation, the specific thing that happened on the specific day that made the specific scene work. The orientation is toward the specific and the accumulated rather than the pattern and the synthesised. That specific-and-accumulated orientation is Si as the auxiliary, confirming INFP rather than INFJ.
The engineering background is the most reliable type evidence. The ENFP with an engineering background uses it as one interesting domain among many. The INFJ with an engineering background synthesises it into a framework about how systems work. Rankin used it as a livelihood for years while the Fi worked out what the vocation actually required, then left it when the interior assessment produced a clear enough verdict. That relationship to the engineering - instrumental to the interior's process, not primary in itself - is the INFP's most honest vocational structure.
The INFP Personality
Values-driven and deeply internal. INFPs hold firm ethical convictions that are entirely their own and rarely up for debate. They are not passive - their gentleness conceals a strong will about what matters.