Building Gilead’s world — and the world beyond
The meticulous designers behind Handmaid’s Tale sweat every little detail
What kind of nipples would you put on baby bottles in a society where plastic is banned because of the harm it causes to the environment?
That’s one of the questions Bruce Miller and his team debated as they built the world of Gilead for The Handmaid’s
Tale. (The answer: silicone.) A visit to the show’s Toronto set gave a glimpse of the exacting detail that goes into creating that world.
Details that may flash by on the screen have been sweated not just by showrunner Miller, but also a given episode’s director, the set designer, the wardrobe designer and director of photography.
Take the colour of the sitting room in the Waterford house, set in a fictional version of Cambridge, Mass., where Commander Fred Waterford and wife, Serena Joy, live with their handmaid and other servants.
“The number of colours we went through, I mean this probably has 13 coats of paint of slightly different shades of teal,” said Miller of the walls.
Asked if it was coincidence the walls mimic the colour of Serena’s dresses, Miller said, “Nothing is a coincidence.”
So the paintings in that room are copies of real art from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and other museums because the leaders of Gilead would have looted those places.
The bird song heard onscreen comes from birds that don’t exist in present-day Cambridge but that would presumably come back if environmental stresses were eliminated.
And because the grand old Hamilton house that stands in for the Waterford home has creaky floors, set designer Julie Berghoff made the floors in the reproduction rooms creak.
Then there are the costumes. Ane Crabtree and her staff make up to 95 per cent of the clothing worn on the show.
“With a novel so specific … it’s very difficult to translate that into clothing on the rack,” said Crabtree, who won a Costume Designers Guild Award and was nominated for an Emmy for Handmaid’s Tale.
In a large, high-ceilinged room in the studio stand rack upon rack upon rack of clothing — all of it meticulously catalogued.
In Season 1, one conundrum for Crabtree was what colour red to make the handmaids’ dresses and other garb.
“It was quite challenging in the beginning to try to come up with something that would work for every skin tone, everybody’s shape,” Crabtree said.
Nature provided an answer. “After trying out a million samples of fabric I just went to the colour of blood.”
She turned to another one of her go-to inspirations — music — when she struggled to come up with costumes for the “colonies” in Season 2.
It was a Saturday: sketches were due by Monday and nothing was drawn. “I couldn’t remember the name for the colonies … I kept calling it ‘this bitter earth,’ ” Crabtree said. She googled that phrase and came up with a YouTube mash-up of the 1960 song of that title by Dinah Washington and Max Richter.
“I sketched all day 20 hours non-stop with the song on loop.”