Time travel has always been a popular subgenre of science fiction, with films like Groundhog Day, Back to the Future, and Bill & Ted. It remains highly in-demand even now, dominating Marvel Cinematic Universe projects like Loki, Avengers: Endgame, and the upcoming Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania.
There are countless other projects on the way, and this new one is so ambitious that it has grown from a feature into an eight-hour-long series during its years of production. The Time War, a film by sci-fi veteran Neil Johnson, is finally ready to release this year, and it features many talents that Comic Book Movie fans will likely recognize.
The cast members include Daniel Logan (Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones), Christopher Showerman (Supergirl), William Kercher (The Hobbit), Barry Corbin (Anger Management), Stephen Manley (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock), and Aaron Jacques (Starship Rising). Meanwhile, the late Christopher Lee (Lord of the Rings) narrates the series. Check out the official tagline below.
Starring Tracey Birdsall, the series is set in an alternate universe that has occurred as a result of the Nazis successfully experimenting with time-travel history during World War II. As Adolf Hitler starts to re-write his genetics, he learns that cause and effect are not as simple as they may seem on paper. After dealing with multiple versions of himself, his greatest nemesis is his own daughter (Birdsall) who takes on his legacy of empire building and creates an army of one, from various versions of herself from across a billion different timelines.
Tracey Birdsall spoke with us about the upcoming series, giving us a ton of information on the production and the plot.
She also spoke with us a bit about her new role alongside Tim Heidecker in Tim Robinson's new season of I Think You Should Leave on Netflix and a multitude of other things. We've included the audio version below ahead of the written transcript and official poster. Meanwhile, those looking for the full video interview experience can scroll to the bottom!
Tracey Birdsall: It's a time travel series, and it's basically Adolf Hitler traveling through time and rewriting history because he has a messiah complex, so he's rewriting his genetic code. I play not only his daughter but also his nemesis. It's the darkest thing I've ever done, and there are a lot of different versions of my character, so it's definitely the most complicated thing I've ever done because different versions get plucked through time. And of course, they have to put experiences and different outlooks and different appearances and different everything, really.
But that is a very deep, dark, twisted series that initially started out as a movie, and then it just kept growing and growing. And the next thing we know we're going to a couple of different countries to film. So, we just keep getting these phone calls, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. So, it's super exciting to see it come to fruition because we actually started filming about five years ago, but the original script is about fifteen years old. So it's the pet project of the director, and it has just grown massively. It's coming out in the very near future, it's in the final stages of the post, and the other cast members and I are pinching ourselves because it's finally coming to fruition. Because we went through so much for it, and it's just very exciting when a big project is nearing its end.
I'm kind of a sci-fi junkie since I was a little kid, so I've watched a million things with time travel. But, of course, I've done sci-fi films before, but this is the first time that I have had the experience of time travel. And it's really funny because you do it for so long and so many scenes in different places that you start to kind of buy it yourself, you know? And I would say we broke a couple of the rules, but mostly because the characters needed to interact with each other. So there was like an army of characters, and you have to break a couple of the rules like the touching rule and stuff like that.
But it's its own beast. You don't have to necessarily follow the rules even though we all know the rules of time travel. Because it's kind of like when you die in sci-fi, you can always come back; it doesn't mean your character's gone. So I think you have to trust the material, and when the director and the writer hand it to you, you just have to make it be. This is the way things are now.
What do you guys think of this poster and these comments? Does this seem like a miniseries you're excited to check out while waiting for more of Loki?
Watch the full exclusive video interview on Literary Joe's Inner Child Podcast below, and be sure to share your thoughts in the usual spot!
I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with Tracey Birdsall about her acting in the upcoming 8-hour series The Time War. Also, we dove into her work alongside Tim Heidecker and Tim Robinson for the new season of Netflix's I Think You Should Leave. We chatted about her work on and off of the camera, and we touched on many other fun tidbits that I'm sure you'll enjoy.
The release date for The Time War is currently TBA.