Time can sometimes feel like a flat circle. It may not seem that long ago that there was a splashy, big screen version of The Time Traveler’s Wife, based on Audrey Niffenegger’s best seller. It starred Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana. It grossed just over a $100 million worldwide, a large chunk of that from the U.S. It may seem too soon for a splashy HBO version… except that the film came out in well over a decade ago. Talk about feeling unstuck in time!
This version, which hits HBO this May, stars Game of Thrones alum Rose Leslie as a Claire, whose husband (Theo James, of Divergent and the forthcoming Sundance hit Dual) just happens to be a time traveler. (In real life, Leslie seems very happily married to her old coworker, Kit Harington.) No, he doesn’t have a time machine. For complicated reasons, he can’t control when he suddenly jumps forward or backwards in time. And yet he’s in love, with a very patient — but very anguished — woman who struggles with the fact that sometimes her spouse abruptly disappears, sometimes without turning off a running sink.
The movie version, released in 2009, banged this out in 107 minutes. This is a six-part miniseries, complete with video diaries Leslie’s character records in which she vents about her inadvertently errant husband. There’s a number of arresting ideas in the new teaser trailer, among them a bit where James’ time-hopper winds up meeting his wife when she’s a young child. It looks less soapy than the movie and more about living with a less-than-preferable situation, which surely we can all relate to nowadays.
The new The Time Traveler’s Wife debuts on HBO at an as-yet-unspecified time in May. You can watch the teaser above.
(Via Gizmodo)