Rachel McAdams was the female lead in the movies The Time Traveler's Wife and Midnight in Paris, and now she's co-starring in Richard Curtis' new movie About Time. In all three films, the dude takes off time-traveling, leaving McAdams behind. So McAdams, quite rightly, is wondering when it's her turn.


Talking to AAP, McAdams says she's "kind of bitter" about this:

"It's pretty unfair," she says only half-jokingly. "I've now done three films with time travel in them and I've not gotten to time travel once so I'm kind of bitter about that. (But) I think it just made it all a little smoother that not everyone was allowed to know."


In About Time, Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) discovers that the men in his family can travel through time (basically jumping backwards through their own lifetimes.) And he decides to use this ability to get himself a girlfriend, since now he can correct his own mistakes at will. McAdams admits to the AAP reporter that this means her character's perfect relationship with Tim is based on lies — and if her character knew, "She'd be like, this marriage that's supposed to be so open and honest ... she'd be pissed."

The AAP also talked to Curtis himself, who said his own daughter complained about the "only men can time-travel rule" — his daughter suggested that the final scene of the movie should reveal that the women in Tim's family have a superpower, too. Like, maybe the women can fly. (Spoiler alert: he didn't adopt her suggestion.) When the reporter asks Curtis why it is that only the men can time-travel in his film, he responds, "It's a very good question and I'm looking forward to more time travel movies with girls."

(The real answer? About Time is structured as a pretty traditional rom-com, which means it relies on the male character to be the one with the special quirk or ability, much like Tom Hanks knowing that Meg Ryan is the person he's emailing with in You've Got Mail while Ryan remains ignorant of that fact. Or the classic example, Mel Gibson's female-specific telepathy in What Women Want. There's a whole subgenre of rom-coms where the man is given an artificial advantage, either by magic or by plot shenanigans.)