Ten weeks after giving birth to her son, Rose Leslie began filming The Time Traveler’s Wife.
“On the weekend, my husband would have to take some downtime, and then I would step into the role of parenting, which I obviously love,” Leslie tells Inverse. “I felt like I was missing out on my boy growing up.”
Premiering on May 15, the new HBO drama chronicles the highs and lows of an extraordinary marriage between artist Clare (Leslie) and her time-traveling husband Henry (Theo James). While Leslie is in a famous marriage of her own with her Game of Thrones’ co-star Kit Harington, the experience of filming The Time Traveler’s Wife will always be tied to the birth of her child.
Leslie isn’t the only collaborator to experience such a strong connection to this project from creator Steven Moffat. Everyone from her co-star Theo James to series director David Nutter found something personal and powerful in the process of creating The Time Traveler’s Wife. The result is arguably the most intimate time-travel story ever told. Here’s how it all came together.
THE RULES OF TIME TRAVEL is an Inverse special issue exploring the evolution of science fiction’s most imaginative sub-genre. From Marty McFly to Avengers: Endgame.
A Complicated Love Story
Before there was the HBO series (and the 2009 movie), there was Audrey Niffenegger’s best-selling novel. The book introduces Clare and her husband Henry, a man with an uncontrollable ability to travel through time to different points in his life — and his wife’s, too. Clare first meets Henry when she is a child. Henry is her “imaginary” friend until she learns the truth of who he is (or who he’ll eventually be) when she is older.
Like the novel, the series switches from past to present following the evolution of their relationship, interspersing moments from Henry’s time-traveling history and Clare’s childhood memories. We see Henry and Clare at…
