On the wings of success
The Handmaid’s Tale returns to TV after its first season gathered heaps of critical praise
On the Toronto set of The Handmaid's Tale. Season 2 of the award-winning TV show based on Margaret Atwood’s novel debuts April 29. DEBRA YEO You could say Bruce Miller and his cast and crew donned metaphorical handmaids’ hoods to make the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale.
A lot has happened since the Hulu/MGM series — based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel about a dystopian society that enslaves its women — was first released in April 2017. Besides gathering heaps of critical praise, The
Handmaid’s Tale won the Golden Globe for Best Drama and eight Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama and a writing prize for showrunner Miller.
It also became part of real-world political conversations when women wore handmaid costumes to protest bills seen as injurious to women’s rights at U.S. state legislatures.
That’s a lot of added pressure on top of the usual sophomore jitters, so how does one cope?
One puts on blinders and gets down to the business of making the best TV show one possibly can.
“It’s a huge burden to make something good and then try to do it again,” Miller said during a media visit in February to the Toronto studio where Handmaid’s Tale is partly shot.
“It’s a huge burden — there’s an Emmy sitting in the middle of your keyboard that you’re trying to type around, and what you have to do is eventually take that in and throw it away, just write the show and do what we do.”
So that’s what they did. And based on the two episodes made available for pre-screening by the media, they have equalled if not surpassed Season 1.
The first season followed the plot of Atwood’s novel, set in a near-future society known as Gilead in which a totalitarian, patriarchal, fundamentalist regime has overthrown the U.S. government. After a catastrophic decrease in the birth rate, fertile women are held captive as breeding stock, producing children for the regime’s leaders and their barren wives.
Season 2, which debuts April 29 at 9 p.m. on Bravo, has the benefit — and burden — of going beyond the novel’s source material. Miller says that wasn’t as fraught as you might think since, in the book, “there are so many tantalizing mentions of the world beyond (Gilead) that it was no trouble coming up with the world beyond,” and Atwood was there to offer her expertise. The beyond includes the much-feared “colonies,” badly polluted areas of North America where handmaids and others who disobey the rules are sent to do punishing physical labour, but viewers will see other places outside the strictly controlled parameters of the regime, as well as new characters — including “unwomen” and “econowives” — and more flashbacks to characters’ pre-Gilead lives. Atwood’s book ends with handmaid Offred (played by last year’s Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss) being taken away in a black van by the secret police known as the Eyes; whether to her doom or her salvation is unknown. That’s also where Season 1 ended and where Season 2 begins. What come immediately after are some of the most harrowing scenes you’re likely to see on a TV show, and some stellar acting from Moss and Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia, chief among the older women who keep the handmaids in line.
The new season offers some hope for Offred, but it doesn’t take long for the misery of a world gone mad to intrude again. Part of what makes the series so interesting to watch is the roller-coaster ride between the highest and lowest points of human behaviour and emotion.
Jeremy Podeswa, a Torontoborn film and TV director who has worked on plenty of prestige dramas including Game of Thrones, directed two episodes of Handmaid’s new season and sees it as an “incredibly successful extension of the first season.”
“I think they’ve done a really great job of kind of satisfying audience expectation and … continuing the emotional journeys of all the characters,” he says.
Max Minghella agrees. He plays Nick, chauffeur to Offred’s owner, Commander Fred Waterford (played by fellow British actor Joseph Fiennes), and Offred’s secret lover.
“I think it’s stronger than what we did last year,” Minghella says. “It feels more cinematic to me; it feels richer; it feels (like) visually it has more scope, but I just think … for all of the characters we all get to be more dynamic.” Canadian actress Amanda Brugel found her Season1role as Rita (a “Martha,” or domestic servant in the Waterford household) some of the most challenging acting she’s ever done, given that there were so few lines of dialogue: conversation among inferiors in Gilead is usually restricted to just a handful of platitudes.
“In Season 2, you’ll start to see more of Rita, the fact that she did used to be a very strong woman,” says Brugel. “I think that Rita and Offred would have been friends in the real world pre-Gilead and so … there’s a friendship that slowly develops, but there’s also this hesitance to have bonds because, ultimately, Gilead will rip them apart.”
There is also a shift in the often-hostile relationship between Offred and Waterford’s wife, Serena Joy, says Yvonne Strahovski, who plays her: a new closeness “because of certain circumstances that arise in the household.
“We do have a weird underly- ing respect for one another in some ways, but there’s a lot of stuff that overshadows that at the same time, and we’re just going deeper and deeper into battling with all those complexities.”
The Australian actress, perhaps best known for her five seasons as Sarah on Chuck, is one of several performers whose characters do despicable things on The Handmaid’s Tale. Strahovski says she “stripped away all the judgments” to connect to Serena’s humanity.
“I don’t think anyone really ever sets out to create an evil kind of society and I think, back in the day, she was someone who saw that the human race was diminishing at a very fast rate and … so I think she really tried to inspire (women) to have babies and take your power back in your biology, and I think that was the initial thought behind what ends up happening.”
Likewise, Dowd says Aunt Lydia — who metes out some particularly cruel punishments to the handmaids — believes she’s doing the only thing that will keep those girls alive.
“The world went to hell,” Dowd says. “The promiscuity, the lack of respect, the lack of God in their lives. The degree of pollution, the birth rate falling; I think Lydia found that horrifying and whatever she can do to make sure that never happens again is her goal.”
Although Moss wasn’t present during the set visit, which also took in the Hamilton house that stands in for the Waterford home, the name “Lizzie” was rarely far from others’ lips. Podeswa says he was drawn to Handmaid’s Tale in part because he wanted to work with her. “I direct a lot of very interesting shows and, even among that very high level of material, Handmaid’s Tale really stands out as an amazing work of art and an amazing piece of television.” He says it has one of the best casts ever assembled on TV — Moss, in particular: “I’ve rarely seen anything like what she’s doing on this show.”
But there was plenty of praise to go around.
Sydney Sweeney, who plays Eden, a new character this season, says every actor on the series “deserves some sort of recognition”; Dowd praised the “remarkable” writers; Brugel decried the fact the Canadian crew aren’t singled out for awards “because they work just as hard if not harder than the actors on the show.”
Everyone brings their A game to set, she says. “When we came back from the Emmys, everyone dug in deeper and we all sort of looked at one another and said, ‘OK, it’s on. Now we have to knock it out of the park even more.’ Not for everyone else, not for Hulu, not for the viewers, but for ourselves, because we take so much pride in doing this project and it’s been like that from Day 1.”