Aunt lydia

The Handmaid’s Tale’s stern matriarch is just trying to help her girls

It’s something of a cliché for actors to claim that they don’t approach a villainous role as if they’re playing a villain. Frankly, we don’t always buy that – Lex Luthor’s probably got a fair idea that he’s the bad guy. But this is one case where we totally buy into the notion of a deplorable character believing they are on the side of the angels.

In key respects, Aunt Lydia – the woman in charge of educating Gilead’s Handmaids – is utterly monstrous. She has no qualms about meting out horrific punishments. In the season two opener she calmly oversees one Handmaid after another being handcuffed to a stove and scalded. But it’s clear she believes in the rules governing this society, and that she’s shepherding her flock. In her mind, what she’s doing is like smacking a baby’s hand away from a plug socket. When she leads

Offred to the dangling corpse of a man who aided her during her escape attempt, she’s not driven by malice, but by love. When she kisses Offred on the forehead, it’s obvious there’s a sincere maternal attachment.

With her patronising tone and fuddy-duddy language – “Rub a dub dub!” she trills cheerily, as she instructs Offred to flannel her privates – the character is beautifully scripted, and Ann Dowd delivers a bravura performance, showing us tantalising glints of warmth one moment and flashes of steel the next. We haven’t yet (at time of writing) seen her given flashbacks to flesh out the character’s backstory, but we’d love to see them come. Perhaps Lydia was a school teacher? Or a midwife? But we can also picture her standing outside an abortion clinic, red-faced, waving a photograph of a foetus. Whoever she was then, she’s fascinating now. Ian Berriman