Justin Timberlake Gives Parenting Advice to Olivia Wilde

Starring together in the upcoming sci-fi thriller In Time, Justin Timberlake and Olivia Wilde found themselves struggling with a bit of an odd dynamic while they filmed. Timberlake said that as they did scenes where he played her son it felt weird, most notably because he is three years older than Wilde. In Time is set in a future dystopia where no one lives to be older than 25 (Wilde is 27 and Timberlake is 30), and the wealthy can “buy time” to life past the cutoff. Timberlake recalls coaching the slightly-younger Wilde to behave as his mother might during certain scenes:

“We’d read the script and I would say, ‘Here’s something my mom might do’, or, ‘Here’s the way my mom might say it’. I think she really looked to me to give her those little things because she had the trickier job in our scenes.”

For the time lapse drama, director Andrew Niccol said it was a challenge to select actors and actresses who could believably play an older character while appearing to be in their mid-twenties. Niccol elaborates:

“I went on a search for these old souls… Even for a small role like a priest, where you typically cast a worn-out 75-year-old character actor, I now had to find a worn-out 75-year-old character actor in a 25-year-old body.”

Of Wilde, he says:

“She just inhabited the role… Olivia has something about her — a maturity that’s way beyond her years.”

For others in the cast, Niccol chose Amanda Seyfried as Timberlake’s love interest. Cillian Murphy, of Inception and 28 Days Later was also cast, as was Vincent Galecki.