Romance was certainly in the air during the filming of the 1980 drama “Somewhere in Time.”
Jane Seymour revealed that she “fell madly in love,” both on- and off-screen, with her co-star Christopher Reeve. While the 71-year-old had previously touched upon the strong friendship she had with Reeve in the past, she is just now getting candid about their love affair.
“Well, here comes the story that I’m officially telling you now, because Chris and I, when we made the film, we literally fell madly in love,” Seymour said at the TCM Classic Film Festival over the weekend.
While chatting with TCM host Alicia Malone, the “Wedding Crashers” star got emotional talking about her relationship with the late “Superman” actor while filming the time-travel movie.
“When you see this film, you will see the real thing,” she said. “But we didn’t let anyone know. So a few of the people who worked on the show kind of sussed it out, but we were as subtle as we could be about it.”
“We were madly in love and life was wonderful,” Seymour continued. “We were both single; it was a fantastic, amazing experience.”
She then noted that their relationship came to a halt at the same time she filmed a scene where her character, Elise, and Reeve’s Richard lose each other after the latter wakes up in his own time period.
She explained what went down that fateful day that led to their split: Seymour received the shocking news that Reeve was expecting a baby with his ex-girlfriend the same day the actors were to shoot the love scene as well as a breakup scene.
“And then one day I came into work to film one of the biggest scenes in the movie… Just before that, Chris had had an earlier call and I came in about half an hour later, and they said, ‘Chris needs to talk to you about something.’ I thought, ‘That’s really odd, we’ve had a long time to talk about things, so what could it be?’” she recalled.
“It was that he was about to have a baby, and that his ex-girlfriend hadn’t told him, and that she’d just announced it to the world,” the “Fifty Shades of Black” actress said.
Reeve and his ex, Gae Exton, had a son named Matthew around the time of filming. The disability activist and the modeling executive stayed together until 1987 and also welcomed a daughter, Alexandra.
Seymour joked that she had to “put my big-girl pants on” to shoot and had “tears coming halfway up my eyeballs” when she shot heartbreaking scenes.
“And I just kept saying, ‘You can’t cry, you can’t cry, you can’t cry, you’re happy. Elise is really, really happy right now,’” she said.
Reeve died in 2004 at the age of 52 after suffering from cardiac arrest. Seymour and the “Village of the Damned” actor stayed good friends over the decades up until his passing.
Her son Kristopher is even named after her late friend.
“The good part of the story is that Chris went on to have these two beautiful children and we met one another on many occasions,” Seymour said during the festival. “We remained really, really close friends, literally until the day he died. I have to believe that I will one day see him somewhere in time.”
