A24 built its reputation on films too specific to travel, and then watched them travel anyway. Its expansion into television has followed the same logic, and “The Ministry of Time” is shaping up as the most ambitious test of it yet: a British time-travel drama, made for the BBC, that the studio clearly intends to sell as a global event rather than a domestic commission. The proof is in who keeps signing on.

As Deadline first reported, ten more actors have joined the six-part series, led by BAFTA winner Adeel Akhtar and Academy Award nominee Ciarán Hinds. Akhtar will play Quentin Ackerly, the Ministry handler assigned to the show’s protagonist, Sophy, while Hinds takes the role of her father, Peter. They are joined by Hong Chau, Tamara Lawrance, Emily Fairn, Josh Finan, Aisling Loftus, Tawfeek Barhom, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Hélène Patarot, who plays Sophy’s mother, Channary.

The density of awards-caliber names around a single BBC drama is the real story. Alice Birch, who turned “Normal People” into a defining piece of prestige television and wrote “Dead Ringers” and “Lady Macbeth,” is adapting Kaliane Bradley’s bestselling debut novel; Aneil Karia, the “Top Boy” director whose short “The Long Goodbye” won an Oscar, serves as lead director. For A24 — the company behind “Beef” and “Dreaming Whilst Black” — it is a statement that its television arm can convene the same caliber of talent as its film slate.

Bradley’s novel is an unlikely fusion of spy thriller and romance: a near-future government ministry masters time travel and begins extracting “expats” from history, assigning each a civil-servant “bridge” to live alongside. Sophy, a British-Cambodian bridge, is paired with a 19th-century Arctic explorer pulled from a doomed polar expedition — a premise that gives Hinds’s casting an extra charge, since Sophy is played by his real-life daughter, Aoife Hinds.

The series is now filming as a six-part drama for BBC One and BBC iPlayer, produced by A24, with Birch’s scripts and Karia directing. Billy Howle co-leads opposite Aoife Hinds, anchoring an ensemble that A24 has spent the late summer steadily expanding.

It is a neat piece of casting symmetry: a father and daughter playing a father and daughter, on a show about people torn out of their own time and asked to belong in someone else’s.

Tags: Pelé, casting, a24, BBC, Adeel Akhtar, Ciarán Hinds

A24 stacks ‘The Ministry of Time’ with Oscar and BAFTA talent to make its BBC bet travel

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