In 2018, HBO won a bidding war for former Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat’s adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Audrey Niffenegger’s novel had been adapted once before—into a movie starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams—but Moffat had been in love with the book for years; he wrote “The Girl in the Fireplace” in response to Niffenegger’s story. His adaptation has been chugging along behind the scenes, and now is one step closer to filming with the casting of Theo James (Divergent) as the time-traveling Henry, and Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones, pictured above) as Clare, who meets Henry over and over again at different points in time.
As the novel summary puts it, “Henry and Clare’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love.”
In a previous statement, Moffat said of The Time Traveler’s Wife‘s narrative, “The brave new world of long form television is now ready for this kind of depth and complexity. It’s a story of happy ever after — but not necessarily in that order.” Now that he gets to try his hand at the very story that inspired his own time-traveling romance, will Moffat put his own clever spin on things, or stick close to the book? The show is in pre-production, so it will still be a while before we find out.
