We hope this couple has really good home owner's insurance.
In the preview for HBO's The Time Traveler's Wife, Rose Leslie's character, Claire, is confronted with the perils of marrying a time traveler, who disappears at the most inopportune moments. "The bed sheets will go slack," she says, "or the shower will keep running and you realize that he's gone."
The scene flickers to a sink overflowing with water. Claire says of her husband, "He's just a pile of clothes."
And her husband Henry, played by Theo James, recognizes that it's not easy to be married to a one-man disappearing act. "It's not a superpower," he says. "It's what's wrong with me."
But it's not his fault, he explains, "I can't keep hold of a current moment, I just slide off. And I fall back in time."
When he reappears in another era, Henry is naked and unaware of his surroundings. Sometimes, he's fortunate enough to visit a young Claire, but others he's dropped off in the middle of train tracks with little time to react.
"When he's gone, I wait and I worry," Claire says of the experience. "I wonder where he is—when he is. If he's in danger."
But, as she puts it, "I married a time traveler. It's complicated."
And we thought our love life was a mess!
If this story is giving you a major case of déjà vu, that's because this is the second time that the 2003 book of the same, by Audrey Niffenegger, name got the Hollywood-adaptation treatment. Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana previously starred in the 2009 Focus Features film.
HBO decided to take a stab at the project, bringing on Doctor Who and Sherlock's Steven Moffet to executive produce the series. "This is a story of loss but it's not a tragedy," Moffet said in a media release. "It's about a time traveler but it's not science fiction. Despite Clare and Henry's time scrambled relationship, this is the tale of a grand, ordinary love—but not necessarily in that order."
Like Claire said, it's complicated.
And while the subject matter is the same as the film, the six-episode series allows the writers to explore the novel in greater detail. This means that Claire and Henry's friendship with Gomez (Desmin Borges), who is secretly in love with Claire, gets more screen time than it did in the movie.
Moffet teased how the story will unfold, saying, "This is going to be the love story we need right now."
Appropriately, the show about the slippery nature of time doesn't have an exact premiere date yet, but it's set to debut on HBO sometime in May.