Tamara Lawrance Enters ‘The Ministry of Time’ Hierarchy
'The Ministry of Time' cast is a mix of up-and-comers, solid BBC A-list regulars, and one sweet real-life couple.
Even before Kaliane Bradley’s bestselling debut novel, The Ministry of Time, hit bookshops in mid-2024, it was already making waves on the small screen. Three months before the book’s arrival, the BBC announced it had gotten ahead of other production studios by optioning the rights to adapt it as a limited series, with Alice Birch (best known for her work on the BBC Three hit Normal People) attached to write the scripts.
The novel became a critical darling, even making former President Barack Obama’s summer reading list that year, along with most “Best Books of the Year” lists and a Hugo Award nomination. Billed as a genre-bending sci-fi romance/spy thriller workplace comedy, the near-future story stars a civil servant who is hired to work in the recently established Ministry of Time, a bureaucratic division in charge of time travel.
Of course, as the book wasn’t even out yet, the project sat on a shelf in development hell for a couple of years, waiting for the BBC to get around to it, with the first casting finally arriving in mid-2026. However, the delay hasn’t stopped what seems to be an absolutely delightful series from taking shape, with an interesting mix of up-and-comers, solid BBC A-list regulars, and at least one adorable nod to fans of the quiet, long-lasting marriages that are a sweet staple of the British acting community.
Here’s the series (slightly refined) 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, earns a hard-fought promotion in the civil service, only to learn that her role as a ‘bridge’ 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.
Throughout the series, 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.
The cast joining them includes Tamara Lawrance (Get Millie Black) as Sophy’s work BFF, Simellia; Adeel Akhtar (Down Cemetery Road) as Quentin Ackerly, Sophy’s handler; and Hong Chau (Wuthering Heights) as Adela, the Vice-Secretary of Expatriation. On the “ex-pat” side, the cast includes Emily Fairn (House of Guinness) as Margaret Kemble, Josh Finan (Say Nothing) as Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth and Aisling Loftus (War & Peace) as Anne Spencer.
The series has also cast real-life spouses Ciarán Hinds (Belfast) and Hélène Patarot (The Dry) to play Sophy’s parents, Peter and Channary. Finally, Tawfeek Barhom (The Letter for the King) and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (Narciso) feature as the elusive Brigadier and Salese.
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 is filming in the U.K. It is expected to be released on BBC One in 2027. It does not yet have an American distributor.
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