'Doctor Strange's Rachel McAdams Is Typecast As 'A Time Traveler's Love Interest'

There's something about Rachel McAdams that makes casting directors think of her whenever they need an actress to play the love interest of a guy who travels in time. Perhaps it's the fact that she played the time traveler's wife in The Time Traveler's Wife, which is based on the book The Time Traveler's Wife and is now being remade as HBO's The Time Traveler's Wife. If it wasn't clear, she marries a time traveler (even though he met her when she was 6 and he was a 40-year-old nude man in a field). 

That was in 2009. Two years later, she played Owen Wilson's fiancé in Midnight in Paris, about a guy who is so annoyed by Michael Sheen that he turns this movie's genre from romantic comedy to fantasy by literally just walking into another time period. 

McAdams didn't get to marry the time traveler in that movie, but she got another shot two years later in About Time, once again about a guy who spontaneously travels through time without the aid of phone booths or cramped, stinky (but cool looking) cars. Unlike the previous two movies, this time traveler can control the point in his life he wants to travel to and decides to use these powers for the specific purpose of seducing Rachel McAdams instead of, say, preventing 9/11. She's so impressed that, again, she marries him. 

McAdams played the love interest of a slightly more selfless time traveler three years after that in the first Doctor Strange. This time, Strange has a powerful cosmic gem that can rewind time and uses it extensively in the movie's climax, to the point that their age difference is now probably even creepier than the one in The Time Traveler's Wife. 

She reprised that role last year in the Doctor Strange-themed episode of Marvel Studios' What If, which is all about an alternate Strange abusing his time powers to save an alternate Rachel McAdams from a car accident, even if it means killing, well, everyone else. 

It's worth noting that McAdams also played the love interest in the two Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies and was slated to appear in the third one, which co-star Jude Law desperately wanted to be a time travel story. He even pitched a storyline involving writer H.G. Wells, author of The Time Machine ... which director Guy Ritchie didn't seem to care for ("the time travel one was not the zenith of his ideas"). Maybe he just wanted to avoid typecasting McAdams even further. 

When asked about her weirdly specific acting niche, McAdams said she hadn't even realized the coincidence until she was asked about it while doing interviews for About Time, and pointed out that she has never actually traveled in time herself. Yet. 

Judging from the trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it looks like McAdams will marry someone -- maybe Strange, maybe someone else (one of the Hot Tub Time Machine guys?). Perhaps this movie will usher in a new phase in her career where she plays the love interest to multiverse travelers. We could even get a Spider-Man: No Way Home-type crossover movie where her various selves meet and go beat up that 40-year-old nudist before he can approach that little girl in the field! 

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures Classics