June (Elisabeth Moss) leads a revolution in the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale
When the television series adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s cautionary dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in 2017, the United States had just entered an unprecedented era, with New York businessman and reality TV host Donald Trump at the helm of the country. Suddenly, in tandem with June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) losing her rights almost on a daily basis — first to her funds, then to her job and, ultimately, to her bodily autonomy — scores of Americans woke up every morning, in real life, witnessing their own weakened civil rights.
Nine years later, as the series comes to a close, much of what The Handmaid’s Tale prophesized in those early days appears to be coming to fruition, at an even more rapid pace. “It’s shocking that women have fewer rights today than they did when we started writing the show,” says series writer and producer Eric Tuchman. “I remember sitting in the writers’ room and some of the writers being very concerned about Roe v. Wade being overturned, and I thought, ‘Well, that seems a little farfetched and extreme.’ And look what’s happened. I mean, it is absolutely shocking where we are.”
With real life increasingly oppressive, and the cast and crew delving into one final season of fighting the power, what made co-showrunners Tuchman and Yahlin Chang ’s lives a little less glum was a healthy separation between the mood on screen and the vibes behind the scenes. “Our actors are so fun — they love dancing and they really kept things light,” says Chang. Adds Tuchman, “On this show, people in front of the camera and behind the camera take their work very seriously, but they don’t take themselves very seriously. That makes it a really joyful, encouraging and collaborative environment. It’s one of the things I’m going to miss most about ending the series.”
Well, we’re not there yet. In these final episodes, with most of the main characters having managed to escape Gilead into Canada, the fight against her sworn enemies is far from over for June. As part of resistance movement Mayday, June is eager to lead the fight against Gilead and overturn the totalitarian regime with the help of all the women still held there —who finally appear ready to push back, no matter the consequences. As a result, the final season is not quite the doom and gloom we have come to expect from The Handmaid’s Tale. “This last season is all about rebellion and revolution,” says Chang. “It was a love letter to our fans who have stuck with us through thick and thin and have sat through stuff that is hard to watch. Now we wanted to make something entertaining and fulfill our own wishes of what we want to see. This season, it’s a lot of triumph and hope, and I think that we, as viewers of the series, really deserve that and need that in a relatively dark time.”
June isn’t the only one feeling empowered at this moment. In New Bethlehem, her former mistress Serena Joy Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski) and the architect of Gilead’s economy, Commander Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), are positively gleeful over the potential of this new, more liberalized version of Gilead. “The two of them were instrumental in creating the first Gilead, and they know that they screwed up,” says Chang. “There were things about Gilead that they both really had a hard time stomaching, and I think they feel guilt and a lot of responsibility for what they did. Now is their chance to reform it. Both of them have big egos and big ambitions, and they feel like they’ve remade the world once, they can remake it again. They’re both heroes in their own stories.”
Having started off as adversaries, June and Serena have, throughout the years, been forced to rely on each other. Where that leaves the two, as they both find themselves with freedom to exercise their choices, is a fascinating part of the season. “That relationship is so twisted, where June really had to empathize with Serena, when she was living in her house and enslaved by her, in order to survive,” says Chang. “But June can see, in Serena, this person who has been changed by her and influenced by her. And Serena really wants to be redeemed in June’s eyes. It all adds up to this very weird stew.”
With the series continually exploring what kind of person you become when the world order as you know it crumbles, the complexity of — and empathy for — each of the characters is something the cast has continued to be impressed by throughout their six-season run. “It is an amazing achievement of the show, from the writing and these extraordinary actors, that even the most savage characters, Aunt Lydia [Ann Dowd] and Serena, have a spark of decency in them that June seems to find,” says Whitford, whose own character periodically seems to aid the resistance movement while also being the engineer of hell on earth. “It’s a really interesting thing about the show. It nurtures these questions about human beings in this situation. It’s an amazing thing.”
The Handmaid’s Tale airs Tuesday, May 13 on CTV Drama