Aoife Hinds (Dune: Prophecy, Normal People) and Billy Howle (The Perfect Couple, Under the Banner of Heaven) will star in BBC and A24 fantasy series The Ministry of Time.

Hinds will play Sophy and Howle will be Commander Graham Gore, with filming beginning in and around London, as we reported earlier this year. Further casting will be announced “in due course,” per the BBC.

The show, which A24 is making, is based on Kaliane Bradley’s bestselling debut novel of the same name, and counts Amediateka, Australia’s Binge, Canada’s Crave and Germany’s ZDF as co-producers.

The series is set around The Ministry of Time, a newly established government department that gathers ‘expats’ from across history to test the viability of time-travel. The story sees Sophy achieve a hard-fought promotion in the civil service, only to learn that her role is to help a time traveller – Victorian polar explorer Commander Gore – acclimatize to the modern world as part of a top-secret Ministry programme. Their professional friendship between Sophy and Graham develops into an intense forbidden romance, just as the sinister nature of the Ministry’s true intentions puts them in danger. 

“The Ministry of Time is a truly distinctive, genre-defying series with a beautiful central relationship and we are thrilled to have Aoife and Billy leading the cast,” said BBC Director of Drama Lindsay Salt.

“If I could travel back in time six years to tell past me what was going to happen with that polar explorer she’d just started writing about, I think she would have done some very Victorian swooning,” added novel author Bradley.

The BBC’s Salt commissioned the six-part show, which has been adapted and written by Alice Birch, who is an exec producer alongside Aneil Karia and Jo McClellan for the BBC. Frances du Pille is the producer, and A24 has international distribution rights.