HBO delivers a new incarnation of “The Time Traveler’s Wife” on Sunday night, a theme for a show which delivered a specific set of production challenges that took some clever planning to traverse.
In the latest version of the story, based on the 2003 book by Audrey Niffenegger, Theo James (“Divergent”) plays time traveler Henry, and “Game of Thrones” alum Rose Leslie stars as his wife, Claire.
Henry jumps through time multiple times in every episode — and with different aged Henrys crossing paths with different aged Claires, as well as her housemates Gomez (Desmin Borges) and Charisse (Natasha Lopez), who become their best friends, it made for an unusual filming experience and one that took some getting used to for the actors.
“It was definitely tricky,” James told TheWrap, noting that “some days, you would be shooting – it didn’t happen a lot — but some days you will be shooting Claire at 20, in 1992, Henry is 30, and then in the next scene they would be in a different year, they would be different ages, and they would be basically different people. So it was very discombobulating, to say the least.”
Executive producer Sue Vertue said one way everything was kept straight behind the scenes was because Executive Producer Steven Moffat (the pair are married and producing partners) was known for captaining the time-traveling “Doctor Who” ship for many years.
“Frighteningly, Steven keeps the actual timeline thing in his head so he doesn’t have any board or anything anywhere. So that’s the start,” she said. “So he does the hard work of it, I think.”
Also helpful, according to EP Brian Minchin, was working with the same director across the entire run of episodes – Emmy winner David Nutter, who helmed nine episodes of “Game of Thrones” – and a production team looking to embrace a challenge.
“We had all the scripts in advance, which was great, and we have one director doing all of it, and that director being David Nutter. He’s no stranger to big ambitious shows,” Minchin told TheWrap. “So we had the right people in place and we were all attracted to the challenge of it. And we found that the heads of departments – the designers loved it, the costume designers thought it was fantastic. The makeup and prosthetics and CGI team, they’re all people who are drawn to creating that element. And as creative people, you like doing stuff which isn’t expected or usual. And it was very complicated because not only was the story out of order in the script, but we then filmed the scripts … out of order.”
Minchin continued, “So we had an amazing supervisor Sharon [Watt], who had a giant spreadsheet of every single thing broken down and everyone would come to her and she would know exactly what age everyone was when, what time of year it was, what time of day and everything was kept and recorded. But that’s kind of part of the fun of it, I think. But it all worked.”
“The Time Traveler’s Wife” debuts Sunday, May 15 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.