Organised chaos
Australian actress Yvonne Strahovski has a leading role in one of the most talked-about US TV shows of the year, The Handmaid’s Tale. She opens up to DANIELLE McGRANE about being a part of the thought-provoking series.
Timing, they say, is everything. It’s a phrase the creators of US TV show The Handmaid’s Tale must be very familiar with following their show’s release this year. The series, based on a three-decade old book written by Margaret Atwood, is a surprisingly pertinent feminist tale that’s landed at a time when the social issues played out on screen have incredible resonance with reality.
“We could never have planned for this, ever. You go back to the book, which was written in ’84 and published in ’85, and now, here we are in 2017, making a show that we started shooting pre-American presidential election and then post, and all the different headlines that have come up since then,” Australian actress Yvonne Strahovski, who stars in the show, says.
“It’s just been incredible to see the parallels. It is very eerie.”
Set in a totalitarian dysto- pia in the near future, the show depicts a Christian fundamentalist government called Gilead which has taken over the former US and enslaved the few remaining fertile women, known as handmaids, to bear children in an attempt to continue the future of society.
It’s a brutal world where the wives of the elite are complicit in the arrangement to subjugate these women. Strahovski plays Serena Joy, the wife of the commander played by Joseph Fiennes and the pair enslave a handmaid called Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss.
“I definitely had my difficulties with playing her (Serena) because it’s obviously very hard to relate to someone who has so much brutality within her,” Strahovski says.
One of the toughest struggles for the actress was trying to understand why her character would be complicit in the ceremony – a ritual where the commander has sex with Offred in the hope of conceiving a child, during which Serena is present.
“There was a lot of stuff that really had me stop in my tracks and think. One of the biggest things is the ceremony and trying to figure out what woman in her right mind, faith or no faith, would actually be part of this and allow for this situation.
“It’s a monthly rape of a handmaid and it’s not very good for the wife either, who’s having to watch her husband be intimate with somebody else. There’s all kind of things that came up,” she says.
This isn’t a straightforward TV drama – all kinds of things are constantly coming up. That’s the battle for every actor who has a part to play in this dark new world. But when the cameras stopped rolling, Strahovski still found it hard to face her co-star Moss after the brutal treatment of her character.
“I spent a lot of time apologising for what was happen- ing between action and cut,” she says.
“It’s so brutal. Those were the hardest scenes to film, when Serena has to switch off her empathy for another person because she is also striving to survive. She wants the baby out of the handmaid and she will do whatever it takes at the expense of the handmaid.”
The show is visually stunning, with handmaids dressed uniformly in long red dresses and white “wing” bonnets and the wives dressed in long blue dresses. Everything in Gilead is also positioned in stark contrast with flashbacks of the past where women lived freely.
“There’s so much detail in it and, because the world is so restricted, every little breath and twitch counts. All those nuances have to be there to really fulfil this whole concept of what we’re trying to do,” Strahovski says.