Canadian actor based new role in Handmaid’s on U.S. politician
Commander is ambitious and politically astute, Watton says of character
As he prepared to play a cutthroat commander in the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale, Jonathan Watton of Corner Brook, N.L., heard from the writers that the character was similar to a certain Republican south of the border.
“They said, ‘Look, there’s a particular political person in the States who we’ve thought of and he’s younger, he’s ambitious, politically astute and in some ways out for himself,’ ” Watton said in an interview. And who was that person? “Should I say?” the affable Watton said with a laugh.
“Well, they modelled him a little bit after Paul Ryan (the former U.S. House Speaker). Not in terms of necessarily where he comes from but just where he slots into that power structure: politically astute, intelligent and yet just intensely after a goal. That was helpful for me. It just clarified what his motivations are.”
Watton plays Commander Mathew Calhoun in Season 3 of the Emmy-winning dystopian drama, which is shot in Toronto and around southern Ontario. He first appears in Episode 3, set to air Sunday, and is in five episodes in total. The series is on Bravo and Crave in Canada. Calhoun is a new commander in the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy in which women are treated as a property of the state and some are forced to bear children to combat an infertility epidemic.
Elisabeth Moss stars as protagonist June (a.k.a. Offred), who continues to defy the power structure, along with a resistance movement that stretches into Canada, prompting Calhoun to take a hard line.
“He feels the power structure needs to clamp down, that we need to be stronger here, rule with an iron fist and show no mercy,” said Watton, 41.
“Anyone who shows any weakness, especially of the more established commanders who we’re starting to look at with questions, like Waterford for example, he thinks they need to step aside and we need to come down hard. He doesn’t think of himself as a bad guy, but he’s definitely in this world a bad guy.” Commander Waterford is played by Joseph Fiennes, while Yvonne Strahovski plays his wife, Serena Joy.
“The tag line this year is ‘Blessed be the fight,’ ” said Watton, noting the season shows the resistance taking different “and maybe unexpected forms.”
There’s also “a sense of hope, a sense of agency” for the resistance, he added.
“We see June start to make some strong choices and some difficult ones, of where her loyalties lie and what she’s going to do to take down Gilead.”
Watton’s previous credits include David Cronenberg’s film Maps to the Stars, and the shows Private Eyes, Saving Hope and Murdoch Mysteries, in which he was a series regular as Dr. Darcy Garland.