The dystopian TV drama is winding up for its big finish. Its cast members have lots to say about its relevance.
Nostalgia is a natural reaction when coming to the end of something, a longing for the way things once were.
When Elisabeth Moss wrapped the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale in February and tried to do a rewatch from the beginning, though, she quickly realised that sometimes it’s okay not to look back.
“If you look at some of that first-season stuff, it is grim! It does not look good for us,” she says, laughing, over video while on vacation in an undisclosed location with temperate weather and lush greenery everywhere.
“The first season is like being hit in the back of the head with a tray,” series creator Bruce Miller says. “Lizzie and I were talking about going back and watching it and going, ‘Oh my, people watched Episode 2?!’ And a lot of people didn’t. They were like, ‘Okay, I love it, but I’m out.‘”
Good news for those who tuned out: as the show reaches its climactic conclusion, there’s a drop of hope – maybe even some inspiration – amid the darkness.
The dystopian series became a phenomenon when it premiered in April 2017, just months after President Donald Trump took office. Despite its then-32-year-old source material in Margaret Atwood’s celebrated 1985 novel of the same name, it felt remarkably of the moment, depicting a terrifying future America under an authoritarian regime in which women have been stripped of their reproductive freedom and are forced into sexual slavery to bear children for the wealthy and powerful.
The story centres on Moss’ titular handmaid, June Osborne, whose daughter Hannah is ripped from her arms in the first minutes of the series while they flee for the Canadian border. They’re captives of the brutal theocracy of Gilead, where women get a finger cut off if they are caught reading, and “gender traitors” (anyone not straight) are publicly hanged. Every month, June is ritually raped by Cmdr. Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), while his wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) holds her down, all in the name of fulfilling biblical destiny and solving the world’s fertility crisis.
The day after the show’s first promo aired during the Super Bowl, Atwood’s book shot to No 1 on Amazon.
“Ugh they just need to release the rest of the handmaid’s tale episodes now so we can see what’s going to happen in real life next week,” the comedian Robin Thede wrote on Twitter in 2017, joining a chorus who couldn’t believe how closely the series mirrored their reality. The cast made a video declaring their unwavering support for Planned Parenthood, and Saturday Night Live aired a spoof in which politically unengaged bros are confounded by why their female friends are wearing red robes and white winged bonnets.
Around the country, women wore the handmaid costume to state legislatures to protest attacks on women’s rights, including one in which they gathered in the Texas state legislature and chanted “shame” for eight minutes straight. Mashable called the costume “the most powerful meme of the resistance”. (The show won eight Emmys that first season, including outstanding lead actress in a drama series for Moss and the first award for a streaming show for outstanding drama series.)
Everyone interviewed for this story said they felt a wild, perverse sense of déjà vu filming this final season – which landed on Neon on April 8.
Here they were again, shooting in the winter in Canada during another election in which Trump would defeat a woman for the presidency, this time the first female Vice-President of the United States. And just as in Gilead, some American women were losing their reproductive freedoms. Roe v. Wade had been overturned as the show shot Season 5, and some 19 states have since enacted either total or partial abortion bans.
While the show was wrapping its finale, Trump signed an executive order declaring that there are only “two sexes,” pardoned anti-abortion protesters, cut off foreign aid for reproductive health and enforced a “global gag rule” that bars federal funds to any foreign organisation such as International Planned Parenthood Federation that provides abortion services, counselling or referrals. Pronatalism is on the rise, with Vice-President JD Vance declaring, “I want more babies in the United States.” Civil rights activists fear that other Project 2025 agenda items – a federal abortion ban, restricting access to birth control and surveilling women to track births and abortions – may still be on the table.
“We thought we were done with Trump, and we were hoping that the show could be more of a fictional narrative, which it was always meant to be,” co-showrunner Yahlin Chang says. “And then suddenly we landed in a second Trump presidency, where things are even worse. As a TV writer, you make stuff up. You imagine an alternate reality where bad s--- happens, and it’s really astonishing to see it all come to fruition in real life.”
“The dark joke I make,” says Bradley Whitford, who plays the enigmatic Cmdr. Joseph Lawrence, “is that this moment is like the worst Handmaid’s episode ever. … June is about to be executed, and she turns to the camera, and she says, ‘But I hear they’re really incompetent.‘”
What’s remarkable about the final season, though, is that it suggests a future that would, at least, give liberals hope.
“There’s going to be satisfaction in the fact that the centre will not hold,” says Ann Dowd, who plays the venomous Aunt Lydia, who is charged with training handmaids. “And that’s the truth of this season. The centre of horrible will crumble.”
Some have suggested that America right now feels like the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale. But Gilead is already at the explosive end of the story. Everyone has lived under oppression for so long that they’ve had time to build a resistance, make plans, and fight back.
“For years, we’ve been afraid of them. Now it’s time for them to be afraid of us,” Moss says as Resistance June in the final-season trailer, depicting heart-stopping episodes this Washington Post reporter has seen but will endeavour not to spoil. A mass of handmaids wield box cutters. Luke (June’s husband and a resistance leader, played by O-T Fagbenle) pulls the ring out of a grenade. “This is the beginning of the end,” Moss continues in her voice-over. “We use all our friends, everyone and anyone who hates Gilead, to finally declare, ‘Enough!‘”
“It’s a world where ordinary women show extraordinary strength,” says Warren Littlefield, whose company produced every season of the show. “The handmaid’s robe that was a prison becomes their armour.”
He adds, “Not everyone you know from your five years on the series will make it.”
On a Friday morning in early October, one month before the US election, the mood on the Toronto soundstage is relentlessly upbeat.
“Can we close those curtains so they look a little more theatrical, boss?” Moss asks.
“How does that look, boss?”
The Handmaid’s Tale is the most egalitarian of sets, by design. Everyone calls each other “boss,” including Moss, who is producing, directing and starring in the second episode of the show’s final season – one of four she will direct, including the two-part premiere and the two-part series finale.
Moss doesn’t have to be on camera, so she is dressed down in an oversize white button-down shirt, black sweats and New Balance sneakers. Today’s scene takes place in the opulent home of Whitford’s Lawrence, the wry architect of Gilead’s economy, who alternates between hating the society he has created and wanting to be its ultimate leader. (Whitford says he based the character on Robert McNamara, President John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defence during the Vietnam War, “a big brainiac economist whose brilliance in Detroit making automobiles he brought to exterminating several million people in Asia.”)
Here, Lawrence is talking man plans with Nick (Max Minghella, the driver turned commander who has a child with June) and Nick’s father-in-law, Commander Wharton (Josh Charles, a newcomer this season, playing Nick’s ultra-pious father-in-law, who is determined to woo the widowed Serena).
Moss has an easy, almost familial banter with Whitford, whom she has known since she was 17, from their days on The West Wing.
“I f---ed up,” Whitford says.
“I know, but I kind of loved it!” Moss says.
“I’d like to apologise to the Disney shareholders for my grave mistake,” Whitford says jokingly to the camera. (Disney owns Hulu, which produces Handmaid’s.)
Last season, Lawrence made a bloody power grab that allowed him to build the colony of New Bethlehem as “a kinder, gentler Gilead” – still religious but with far more freedom – designed to rehab the autocracy’s PR problems. Production designer Elisabeth Williams walks me through the interiors of homes where she put glitter in the paint, so the walls would sparkle when light hit them.
In Lawrence’s office, every piece of the beautiful parquet floor was hand-cut and stained in different shades by Williams’ team.
There, dozens of crew members hang on Moss’ words, strewing cups from the Canadian smoothie company Booster Juice out of camera range, among Lawrence’s antique clocks. Two women are standing in for Whitford and Charles. Moss positions them and decides she wants the men to stay standing at the top of the scene because it conveys their distrust for one another. “I like standing because it felt more suspended than ‘We’re going to get comfy now,‘” she says.
Later, she decides she’ll need “a handheld pass,” which brings the scene’s shot list to 12. “MJ is not happy, 11 shots too many,” she says, laughing, referring to assistant director Mike Johnson.
Overall, she will have directed 12 episodes of the series. “This morning when I woke up, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I get to direct these three men in a scene?!’ I mean, come on! This is my life? This is amazing!”
When Moss signed on for The Handmaid’s Tale, she was wrapping Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake – her follow-up to Mad Men – and her stipulation was that she wanted to be a hands-on producer. She had got to the point in her career, she told me at the time, where she didn’t want to commit to another series if she didn’t have a creative say. She checked in on drafts of scripts, looked at cuts, weighed in on casting decisions, and even had costume designer Ane Crabtree mail her fabric swatches so she could make decisions about the exact shade of red for the handmaids’ outfits.
Then in season 3, she finally raised her hand to start directing, figuring this was the safest learning ground. The first episode Moss directed this season takes place mainly on a train headed west toward Alaska, where June and others are fleeing because Toronto has been overrun by pro-Gilead mobs. Moss’ friend Tom Cruise advised her to do it on a set that shook like a real train, and so Williams put the whole thing on giant casters.
“I’ve never seen anybody work as hard as relentlessly as Lizzie did throughout this process,” Whitford says, singling out her performance and June’s endless travails. “It’s like Sophie’s Choice, the series,” he says.
If Season 6 had aired during the final year of the Biden administration, as was planned, it might not have carried as much of a punch. But the scripts they started writing in January 2023 were put on hold because of the writers and Screen Actors Guild strikes. Then they delayed again because Strahovski got pregnant. “And then [we delayed] because of me,” Moss says. She, too, was pregnant.
Moss went back to work three months after giving birth and immediately had to direct herself in the complicated train episode. “How can you not have such a big event in your life affect the work that you’re doing? It’s so present,” says Moss, who will take a moment during our video call to commune with her baby.
She has started thinking about the show differently, as not just a story of survival but also a story of motherhood, and a love letter to anyone who cares for a child. “I think I’ve done a pretty good job playing a mom the past few years, so I don’t feel like I was missing anything in my portrayal. But yeah, it just felt more real,” she says.
The show has never had a problem feeling real. When Trump was first elected in 2016, “I texted Lizzie and I said, ‘What are we going to do?‘” Dowd says. “And she wrote back. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.‘”
That’s a reference to the name of the fourth episode of Season 1, Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum, which they were shooting when he won. It’s a made-up Latin phrase used by British schoolboys and soldiers in World War II that Atwood borrowed for her book. June finds it carved into a wall in her room, perhaps by a previous handmaid. She scrawls it on the wall as a message to Waterford in Season 2 as she runs away for the third time.
That scene was shot during the rise of the #MeToo movement. In another parallel, Chang, the showrunner, consulted UN consultants and psychologists to write an emotional episode in which June is granted 10 minutes to reunite with her kidnapped daughter. A week after it aired, Trump announced his policy of separating families at the border.
“I think the reason why we seem predictive is that we have to get into the minds of these characters who are running an authoritarian regime,” Chang says. “And so, imaginatively, we’re just like, okay, if you’re a really flawed human being who is incredibly selfish and only thinks about what’s good for you, and doesn’t give a crap about anyone else, and follows all your worst impulses, what would you do?”
The day after Trump’s second win, even actors who weren’t on the schedule that day came to set. For many of them, the only Americans they knew in Toronto worked on Handmaid’s.
Among the cast members, Samira Wiley seems to have had the biggest political awakening. She was in her 20s when she got the part of June’s best friend, Moira, only her second big role, after her character Poussey Washington’s heartbreaking premature death on Orange Is the New Black. She didn’t want to ruin a burgeoning career in the business by being too outspoken. She had even considered turning down the part because she was unsure about playing two queer characters in a row. Since then, she has become a vocal advocate for reproductive rights.
“I definitely attribute Moira for me being able to be unapologetic in my beliefs and to say them out loud and proudly,” Wiley says.
Moss says she most felt the show’s impact when they turned the National Mall into Gilead’s capital in February 2019.
The day of their shoot – which had been inspired by images of rallies in Nazi Germany – Trump declared a national emergency in a bid to build his wall on the Mexican border. A sea of red-cloaked extras stood in formation between the Washington Monument, in the show a giant white cross, and the Lincoln Memorial, with the statue’s head and torso ripped off. Passersby had to look twice before realising it was not a giant protest.
“It just felt very meta,” Moss says. “We were, physically, right in the middle of DC … You couldn’t be more in the middle of it unless you were sitting in the Oval Office.”
The high didn’t last. By the time they shot the end of Season 5, Roe had been overturned.
Every series must end, and in the final hour with the full cast and crew, producer Littlefield says, “We have over 500 extras, we’re on a bridge, and there are gallows. And in a very precarious situation, we have our Lizzie Moss, dangling from a rope. She is 30 feet off the ground [in a handmaid’s costume], she has an iPad in her hand, and she’s like, ‘Cut!‘”
At some point, Amanda Brugel (who played Rita, an enslaved domestic servant in the Waterford house) had thought she would be running for a scene with 75 women in handmaid’s outfits. “There was so much pent-up adrenaline and aggression and rage, and we wanted permission to get it out in a safe way,” she says. But before they could go, production called for lunch. So the women ran anyway. “It’s so beautiful … for women to run together towards something, not being afraid of anger, not being ashamed of the ferocity within. It was great.”
Strahovski says she felt “an unexpected wall of grief” to be leaving Serena, whom she had learned to love despite the terrible things she had done. Madeline Brewer, who played Janine, the sweet handmaid who had her eye gouged out on Aunt Lydia’s orders, felt at peace and took an eye patch as a souvenir. As a writer, Chang says she’ll miss not being able to channel the darkness and anxiety she feels into scripts. “I’m worried about not having that particular outlet,” she says.
Moss says she was more emotional about wrapping Mad Men, since she was still editing the Handmaid’s finale when we spoke.
“I probably have a storage space full of s--- that’s coming my way,” Moss says. When production sent out a list of everything they could take, “I literally wrote back to all the [executive producers], and in an incredibly mature move said the word ‘dibs’ on an email. … I was like, ‘Guys, I’m sorry, but I’m the one who’s been working the most intense hours, and if you want June’s nightgown, I think that’s creepy.‘”
Some of them will be coming right back to work with one another on The Testaments, Hulu’s adaptation of Atwood’s 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. It takes place four years after the events of the original (in the book it’s 15) and is the story of June’s daughter being trained to be a wife. “It’s about growing up Gilead,” says Miller, who is the showrunner. “If Handmaid’s is about people on the bottom of the ladder, this is about the girls who are absolutely at the top, and it’s not so much better.” (Moss is an executive producer, and Dowd’s Aunt Lydia is the only core character coming back.)
They’re starting production Monday, the day before Season 6 of Handmaid’s premieres, for release next year.
In her last minutes on the show, Moss describes standing outside in a snowstorm under a bridge, shooting second unit with just a few core crew members. “It was stunning, and we sort of wrapped quietly with the snow falling and everyone just hugging.”
She has, in a place of pride – on a bookshelf in her dining room in New York – a wrap gift Fagbenle gave her, a cartoon of Nick and Luke with their shirts off and June in a bikini on a beach in Hawaii. “I love it so much. It’s my favourite wrap gift I’ve ever gotten,” she says. “But, yeah, that’s not going to happen.”