'Things could get so much worse': inside the Handmaid’s Tale’s darkest season yet
‘I have a very high tolerance for things that are dark and brutal,” says Elisabeth Moss, cheerfully. That, you must conclude, is a fortuitous trait for the star of a series that has become a byword for bleakness. What she has a low tolerance for, however, are those who complain that The Handmaid’s Tale is too traumatic to watch from the safety of the sofa. “Look outside!” she says. “If you can’t face our show, how are you going to face what’s actually happening out there in the real world? It’s important to be able to hold that mirror up to society and try to get people to face what’s going on before it’s too late.”
We are deep into the award-winning dystopian drama’s third season now, and the dark subject matter central to the story – women stripped of their rights, subjugated, enslaved and ranked according to their fertility – feels more horrifyingly relevant than ever.
The first season – faithfully adapted from Margaret Atwood’s seminal 1985 novel – launched a few turbulent months into Trump’s presidency, with reproductive healthcare and immigration (among many other liberties) already in the crosshairs. “Our rights are under threat in a way they have never been before. Or, certainly, that they haven’t been in our lifetimes,” Moss told me at the time.
Season two landed in the midst of the #MeToo movement, itself in part a reaction to the installation as president of a man who had publicly boasted of sexual assault. Now, season three is playing out while access to abortion in the US is rapidly and dramatically dismantled; in May, an all-male state senate in Alabama passed a bill criminalising abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, while five more states – Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, Mississippi and Kentucky – have voted to pass bills that ban abortion after six weeks.
“One would hope this show is a real exaggeration,” says Bradley Whitford, who plays the enigmatic Commander Lawrence, “but it gets a little too close to reality when you’re living in a country where, in some places, you will be penalised more harshly if you are impregnated by a rapist and have an abortion than if you rape somebody.”
Moss, a longtime advocate for the women’s health service Planned Parenthood, says even she has felt a dramatic awakening since the show started. “It happened to come along at a time when we were all woken up by things changing around us,” she says. “I hope people take this feeling of fear – this ‘Oh, it’s so relevant’ and ‘Oh, it’s so scary’ – and they put it into action. I hope it’s not just clickbait. I hope people take that fear and use it to do something.”
The action some viewers have taken, however, is to simply switch off. Season two – the first to depart from Atwood’s original material – was critiqued for descending too far into the darkness of the fictitious Gilead regime. Bruce Miller, the show’s creator, strongly denies any accusation of “torture porn”. “A lot of the brutality is in the heads of our viewers, in their imagination – we’re showing as little as possible on the screen.”
Miller’s rule of thumb, as Atwood’s was, is to include only barbarity visited on women in the real world, today or in history. “We don’t want to start inventing cruelties, because then you are just making pornography and we’re not interested in that.”
While that may be so, season three has already been criticised for keeping Moss’s character, June, in Gilead, instead of allowing her to escape. “We knew we were going to piss people off. We knew they were going to want to kill us – but it had to be done,” says Moss. “I was the one who pulled the noose even tighter. It was my idea that June puts her hand up, and she puts her foot up, so she almost gets in the van … and then she says that last line: ‘Tell her her name is Nicole’, and closes the door. I wanted it to be as frustrating as possible.”
Moss is adamant it was the right decision. “Of course you want her to go with Nicole, to reunite with Luke and everyone lives happily ever after. But that’s not reality,” she insists. “The reality is that her daughter is stuck in Gilead, and if she gets out, she risks never seeing her again … The only person who can infiltrate and resist from the inside is June.”
Resistance is the overarching theme of this season, and the sixth episode, which has just aired, is a pivotal moment in June’s journey. Along with Commander Waterford and Serena Joy, she travels to Washington DC, still the seat of power in Gilead but infinitely more conservative: “Gilead on steroids”. Here, not only do handmaids wear aggressively extended veils that cover their entire mouths, but beneath the veils, their mouths are sealed shut by three bolts through the lips.
“That’s what happens in ultraorthodox regimes,” says Miller. “Some people get more hardline.Gilead was already saying to handmaids, and other women, ‘Don’t talk,’ and here they’re instituting a physical way to make that happen.”
Gilead, says Miller, is now “a pariah state”, but one with “all of America’s nuclear weapons – they are a totalitarian nuclear state. For this season, we thought a lot about North Korea – a place that people don’t get out of.”
“June thinks the Gilead that she knows is bad, but she realises it could get so much worse,” says Moss. “And she realises the clock is ticking, and that there are people moving in who are going to make it worse for her, and much harder for her to do what she has to do.That’s a catalyst for the rest of the season.”
Beyond the question of how much brutality even a loyal audience can stomach, there is a larger question about the effect the series is having on the legacy of Atwood’s subversive feminist text. Is the mainstreaming of a literary classic diluting its impact? Soon after the show launched, women protesting against the rollback of reproductive rights began donning the red robes of the handmaids in Texas and Louisiana. The uniform quickly become shorthand for resistance to the misogyny of the Trump administration, and was worn by activists at events as diverse as the Golden Globes and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
More recently, though, it has crossed over into fancy dress. Last month, the billionaire Kardashian clan member Kylie Jenner threw a Handmaid’s Tale-themed party for her friend’s 22nd birthday. Red-robed guests were served themed cocktails – reportedly “Under His Eye tequila” and “Praise Be vodka” – by would-be Marthas. Can a serious cultural product survive co-opting by a Kardashian? Will there be a rush on fake lip-bolts this Halloween? Only time will tell.
In the meantime, Atwood is publishing her own literary version of season two. On 10 September, she will release The Testaments, her followup to The Handmaid’s Tale, set 15 years after the original story ends. When announcing the book’s publication, Atwood said: “Dear readers, everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.”
Although Atwood serves as an executive producer on the TV series, the team has yet to read her forthcoming novel. “I don’t know how things are going to align story-wise, but I can’t wait to find out,” says Miller. “This is Margaret’s world we’re playing in. I hope our show is a nice companion piece.”
The Handmaid’s Tale continues on Channel 4 in the UK on Sundays at 9pm, and on Hulu in the US.