The BBC’s ‘The Ministry of Time’ Finally Begins Filming
Two and a half years after its original commission, 'The Ministry of Time' is finally in production at the BBC.
Two and a half years after its original commission, The Ministry of Time is finally in production at the BBC, and the broadcaster has announced who will play the series’ lead couple.
It’s been quite a while since the series was originally announced in February 2024, as part of a dozen shows announced at once, many of which wound up ahead of the series in the production line for a variety of reasons. Among them was the fact that the book was author Kaliane Bradley’s debut, and also, and perhaps more importantly, it hadn’t actually been released yet when the BBC announced it was scooping up the rights.
(It arrived on digital shelves and at bookshops three months later, in May 2024.)
However, the BBC wasn’t wrong to get ahead of the pack by nabbing the rights when it did – The Ministry of Time went on to be named one of the best books of the year, and was a Hugo Award finalist. More to the point, the ~30-month gap between the initial announcement and the start of production gave audiences time to discover the book, fall in love with its time-traveling story, and build up a fandom big enough that the casting announcement ended up one of the biggest stories of the week.
Here’s the series synopsis:
The Ministry of Time is a newly established government department gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the viability of time travel. Our heroine, Sophy, achieves a hard-fought promotion in the civil service, only to learn that her role is to help a time traveler acclimatize to the modern world as part of a top-secret Ministry program. Commander Graham Gore is a Victorian polar explorer and one of several ‘expats’ from history who are now part of the Ministry’s extraordinary experiment. The professional friendship between Sophy and Graham develops into an intense forbidden romance that reveals the transporting power of love across centuries, just as the sinister nature of the Ministry’s true intentions increasingly puts them in danger.
Aoife Hinds (Dune: Prophecy) will star as the novel’s narrator, Sophy, and Billy Howle (Under the Banner of Heaven) as Commander Graham Gore, an “ex-pat” from the 1840s, who would have died on Franklin’s lost expedition.
They are the only cast announced thus far. The BBC is expected to announce more in due course.
Alice Birch (Normal People) penned the script, adapted from Bradley’s novel, with Aneil Karia (The Gold) serving as the lead director and Frances du Pille producing. Birch, Bradley, and Karia executive produce, along with A24 and Jo McClellan for the BBC.
The Ministry of Time has begun filming in the U.K. and is expected to be released in 2027. It does not yet have an American distributor.
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