‘Time After Time’ Star Freddie Stroma Previews His Time Traveling Pursuit of Jack the Ripper
Finding out your best friend is a serial killer? A gut punch. Chasing him decades into the future? Completely mind-bending.
That’s the premise of ABC’s new drama Time After Time, premiering Sunday, which stars Freddie Stroma as H.G. Wells (the author of The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds) and Josh Bowman as his best friend, surgeon John Stevenson.
Wells is shocked when he learns his friend is actually the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. Not only that, John steals his friend’s recently-built time machine to travel to the year 2017, where he continues his murdering spree. It’s up to Wells to track him down, prevent more deaths, and try not to alter history too much.
“It’s a terrific cat and mouse game,” Stroma tells Yahoo TV of the dynamic between the two frenemies. Here’s what else he had to say about the Ripper, how Wells’s books will play into the show, and the rules of time travel.
The show starts off with Wells as the good guy, and John as the bad guy. Will we see shades of gray in their characters as they grapple with this modern world?
As the series progresses, you will get to see definite shades of gray. For the most part, you’ve still got Jack being pretty bad and evil. But there are definitely moments that H.G. Wells’s moral integrity is challenged, especially for a man who doesn’t believe in any form of violence but is constantly trying to catch a serial killer. The frustrations will start to get difficult for him. And the same with Jack the Ripper — constantly being alone and not having any love in your life, he’ll start to question things as well.
You describe this as a cat and mouse game, but is it a constant chase? Or will we see interactions where their friendship comes out?
It’s not always constantly evading. There will definitely be times when their goals are going to align and suddenly they might have to work together, or have some form of a common enemy. There are other bad guys out there who also know about the time machine. In those episodes you really start to see the grays coming out.
Wells meets a woman, Jane (Genesis Rodriguez), a museum curator who helps him. Why do they have this instant connection?
To me, the huge attraction for H.G. Wells is that when he arrives, just like in the book and the movie, the world isn’t the utopia he thought it would be. It’s very depressing and he sees it in the people. With Jane, she is the first person who is nice to him and shows kindness and takes him in when she doesn’t have to. To him, that’s a glimpse of hope in the future for humanity. That’s the driving force for why he falls for her so quickly.
When he arrives in 2017, Wells is saddened by the news he sees of terrorists, wars, violence. How will he keep up that hope?
That’s the challenge, really, to try and still believe in the best of humanity. That’s one of the other themes which drew me to it as well. With scientific progress and technology, he was hoping it would better humanity, but it helps us just kill each other more efficiently. There’s that whole responsibility of science, and if it’s good for humanity or not.
Toward the end of the first episode, Wells meets Vanessa, who claims to be his great-great-granddaughter. What’s their relationship like?
It’s a warm relationship between the two. We explain it a little bit, but don’t give too much away. She helps him out a lot, and they’ll be together working to try to get Jack the Ripper. She’s definitely there to help him do that.
Will we see bits of Wells’s books in the show?
Yeah, definitely. That’s one of the things that I’m excited for viewers to see. Obviously, H.G. Wells’s books are fantastic, and what we’re saying in our story that the adventures we go on inspire his books. So, we’ll get to tap into that, obviously with Time Machine, but we get some Doctor Moreau in there as well.
Every time travel show has its own rules about time travel. What are the rules for this show?
One of the rules is that the time machine will go to wherever it is going and it will automatically return, unless you have the key, which means you are in control and it will stay in the time that you are currently in. And then we can’t go back too closely to the same point of time where we traveled too often. As he describes it, it pricks a hole in the fabric of time. If you do it too many times, you risk tearing a hole in time, and God knows what would happen — possibly the end of existence.
And we see that they can go to the future, see what happens, and then go back and change that.
That’s the thing that he’s constantly doing throughout the show. Every second he’s spending there in the future is altering time, and he shouldn’t be there. That definitely comes into question when towards the end, he obviously has to go back because he has to write his books and the rest of it. He doesn’t want to destroy history, but he has affections for Jane so there’s difficulty in that decision.
How much time traveling is there?
We aren’t going to be doing it every episode. I can’t remember how many times we go — maybe four times or something. We save up for those moments. Those episodes I really enjoy and I think viewers will really enjoy. We do it maybe once every three or so episodes.
There are a lot of time travel shows on television right now. Why do you think they appeal to viewers?
I have no idea! Hollywood has its way of having cycles for some reason. I can’t even begin to try to explain that. Time travel is, as with a lot of fads — whether it’s vampires or superheroes — it’s escapism and it’s that “what if” factor. I think people really love to get lost in that world of imaginary “what if” — if you could time travel, what would you do and where would you go? That’s always fun and people enjoy that.
Time After Time airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on ABC.
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