Interview with The Handmaid’s Tale crew
Rencontre avec les créateurs et acteurs d’une série phénomène.
Révélation de l’année 2017, la série The Handmaid’s Tale, librement adaptée du roman éponyme de Margaret Atwood, est de retour sur nos écrans depuis la fin avril (et jusqu’en juillet sur la chaîne OCS). La deuxième saison, sombre et riche en rebondissements, est plus pertinente que jamais. Une journaliste du quotidien britannique The Guardian a rencontré les créateurs, producteurs et acteurs de cette série déjà culte.
We knew that we were doing something important,” says Samira Wiley, reflecting on the feelings of the cast and creators of The Handmaid’s Tale in the months running up to the show’s launch last spring. “We knew that we were making something with a lot of integrity. But we definitely didn’t mean for it to be that timely and that relevant.”
2. Nine months later, the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s seminal dystopian novel was not only sweeping the boards at every awards ceremony – remarkable for a new show, with such dark, brutal themes – but had rapidly become a social phenomenon, too: a symbol of the new resistance, with the handmaids’ uniform co-opted by protesters at US courthouses, on marches, and in Hollywood itself.
NOT A NEW STORY
3. Certainly, the fervour surrounding the series is unprecedented, which is all the more exceptional considering that Atwood wrote the story in 1984. There have been previous adaptations, too: a 1990 film written by Harold Pinter and starring Natasha Richardson, plus an opera and a ballet. But none have sparked the torrent of memes, slogan T-shirts bearing lines from the book, and even, apparently, tattoos of its quotable mantras.
4. The phenomenal success of the series has, of course, been assisted by the story’s prescience: it’s set in a fundamentalist theocracy where women and minorities have been stripped of all rights, the former no longer even allowed to read or write, and all but the top 1% forced into servitude and ranked according to their fertility. And if, a few short months into the Trump presidency, season one arrived into an atmosphere of bewildered anxiety, then season two has landed in an atmosphere of radicalised action, with the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements demanding the end of widespread cultures of misogyny, sexual harassment and abuse.
BEYOND THE NOVEL
5. On a sub-zero day in Toronto, Canada, I visit the set of the show to meet the cast and creators. As season one ended exactly as the novel did – with a pregnant Offred bundled into a van – this second series will not be Atwood’s story, moving beyond the content of the classic text. She is a consultant on the show, and approves the scripts. However, “that doesn’t mean I have veto power”, the author recently told Newsweek. “No one would ever
give an author that; you’d be really foolish to do so.” That simultaneously bestows both freedom and pressure on the show’s writers, on top of already enormous expectations.
6. “The way we made the first season, which was in great ignorance, is exactly the way we’re trying to make the second season,” says showrunner Bruce Miller, as he shows me around the sprawling set. “We try not to think about people out there dissecting it, but instead just think about making something that’s cool.” Elisabeth Moss, a producer on the show as well as its star, also points out that the first season was not a simple facsimile of the book, either.
PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES
7. Nor, if the season opener is anything to go by, are the team afraid of pushing the boundaries of bleak, brutal barbarism even further than in the first series. It is tense, harrowing and bloody; the very opposite of an easy watch. In a timely echo of 2018, one theme explored is that of solidarity. “One of the saddest things about season one for me was Serena [the Commander’s wife, for whom Offred is meant to be bearing a child] not having any solidarity with Offred, or with any of the handmaids,” says Moss. “In season two, we start to think about the fact that if these women actually banded together, they could overthrow Gilead. That’s a very powerful idea.”
DIFFICULT SCENES
8. In Gilead, environmental factors have caused the birth rate to plunge to near zero and the few fertile women are installed as forced breeders for the barren wives of the Commanders of the Faithful. For Joseph Fiennes, whose character (Commander Fred Waterford) has sex with Offred every month, against her will, in a bid to get her pregnant, the burden of playing a rapist – albeit one committing an act sanctioned by the ruling order – does not sit easily. “I am repulsed by it,” he says, simply. “I am very affected by some of the things we have to do, this season in particular, I have found some of it very difficult.”
TV SHOW AND REALITY
9. Moss and I speak again, a few weeks after my visit to the set, on the day of the March for Our Lives, held across US cities and organised by the surviving students of the Parkland school shootings. Donald Trump has suggested, as a solution to the growing tide of similar tragedies, arming teachers in schools. “When I heard that, I got chills,” says Moss. The parallels between the current rapid militarisation of the US and Gilead are undeniable.
10. “In the book, Margaret calls it the new normal,” Moss continues. “It’s a line that Aunt Lydia says – this will all be normal to you one day. That’s scary to me.” She has no tolerance, however, for people who find the show itself frightening. “I hate hearing that someone couldn’t watch it because it was too scary,” she says. “Not because I care about whether or not they watch my TV show; I don’t give a shit. But I’m like, ‘Really? You don’t have the balls to watch a TV show? This is happening in your real life. Wake up, people. Wake up.’”