Eric Bana is not the first naked time traveler. The Terminator films firmly established that you’ve got to be nude to go back in time. Even 12 Monkeys has a bit of that. But Bana might be the most frequently nude time traveler. Every time he re-materializes in The Time Traveler's Wife, he leaves his clothes behind.
The Time Traveler's Wife Trailer
“Here's what happened, here's what happened,” Bana said. “The film was rated PG-13. I never thought you would see any of me in the film. So when I signed on I seriously thought I would never have to drop my drawers. I did and that's fine. I've made peace with it. I made sure not to turn around. I made sure to do as little as possible. Look, I like the left cheek better than the right cheek.”
Time traveling Henry has no control over his journeys past and future. He does use his vantage point to plant seeds in his future lover, though it’s little help when he can’t stay present in her adult life.
“I loved the fact that you had a mixture of the thing that usually sends people crazy, which is unrequited love mixed in with a couple who are actually together and had really present love. I hadn’t ever seen a story where those two elements kind of combine and I've no idea why, exactly why so many people go so crazy over the book in different ways. They connect with it so deeply and it’s different for every person. But I know for me one of the things was that it was like it’s almost like a mixture of two things, where you do have a present couple who are living and loving, and then on the other side you have two people who can't be together. I was really intrigued by it, by that.”
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Time Traveler's Wife
Perhaps time travel is a metaphor anyway. “I can relate to the travel and being together and apart thing. Clearly I think every actor can and I think the same for a journalist. I mean anyone who travels a lot for work, you can relate to it. It’s one of the weird things about the film is that it's the first film I've done where being an actor is perfect preparation for the part, because there's so much that we can relate to.”
And who hasn’t wished that they could have tried a relationship at different times in their lives, when they might have been more stable? “It’s also that thing about synchronicity too, like for anyone who’s in a relationship, if you imagine like you're with your partner today, if your partner met another version of you today that was like the 10 years’ previous model that's not quite as good and not quite as well sorted, would you even be together? Like I love those moments between Henry and Claire where the tables are turned and Claire has the upper hand because she knows so much about older Henry and he’s a young Henry. There's a lot of really interesting themes there about how much we evolve as people.”
The Time Traveler's Wife opens to theaters on August 14th.
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