Crimson cloaks. Stiff white bonnets. Bent heads. If there’s a single picture that Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” leaves audiences with because it ends its six-season run this week, it’s this one: That of ladies in a dystopian anti-America referred to as Gilead, evolving from nameless sexual slaves into rebels, warriors and, typically, survivors.
However for “Handmaid’s” creator Bruce Miller and star Elisabeth Moss, who additionally directed a number of episodes within the ultimate season, the collection, primarily based on the 1985 ebook by Margaret Atwood, was by no means about what the ladies wore. It was concerning the girls contained in the color-coded uniforms.
“June started out as a normal person, a mom, a wife,” says Moss, whose different long-running roles embrace “The West Wing” and “Mad Men.” She gained an Emmy for taking part in the “Handmaid’s” title character in 2017, the identical 12 months the present took residence the primary drama collection prize for a streaming present.
“Then [June] had to shut down and become something that I don’t think she wasn’t proud of,” Moss continues. “But I feel she comes out of that into a place of true heroism, where she is able to be herself, be generous, forgive, inspire other people, lead — but also be vulnerable, ask questions, not know everything.”
Elisabeth Moss within the collection finale of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
(Steve Wilkie / Disney)
Miller, who stepped again from showrunning duties for the ultimate season, with Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang taking on, particularly wished to make sure that as a person, he was telling a female-forward story from the feminine perspective — each within the writers’ room and on digital camera.
“I’m very mindful of the fact that I’m a boy, and who do I think I am?” he says, including that profitable the Emmy boosted his confidence in being a person telling a narrative about girls’s rights. (The collection has 15 Emmys complete.) “Definitely, when you win an Emmy it helps you feel a bit less like you have one penis over the limit.”
Figuring out that, Miller says he centered the story on June and Moss alike, adjusting digital camera angles to deal with her perspective — however lowered to an eye fixed stage that corresponded with the actress’ 5-foot-3 top. “The crowd scenes get much more scary” while you try this, he says. “I want to see the world not just through June’s eyes — but also Lizzie’s eyes, as much as she’s able to show me those things.”
In the meantime, Moss used roles as govt producer and director to deal with the present’s look and the way June got here throughout on digital camera. Ceaselessly, she’s proven smoldering with fury or darkish intent, gazing up from underneath her brows with a lowered chin, one thing Moss says she lifted from Stanley Kubrick’s movies. “That is ‘Clockwork Orange,’” she says. “I am certainly not the first person to do that look.”
Elisabeth Moss.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
However she may be one among only a few actresses to convey it onscreen. “It’s definitely not something women do [on camera],” she says. “Women aren’t allowed to get angry. [June] uses her anger and weaponizes it at so many points during the show — and by the final season, she knows when to do that and when not to.”
The journey June, Elisabeth and “Handmaid’s” have been on started at an uncomfortably synergistic time in American politics: Amid the airing of a collection about girls topic to state regulation of their bodily autonomy, real-world politicians had been efficiently rolling again girls’s reproductive rights. In 2018, protestors started displaying up at real-world occasions in these handmaid-red cloaks and white bonnets, placing the present in an sudden highlight.
“Art does have an impact,” says Moss about that type of a response, however means that repurposing the present’s pictures, outfits or story in service of real-world politics misses a key ingredient of the collection. “I don’t think any of us necessarily set out, when you’re making a TV show, to [make a political statement], because that’s the wrong way to go about it. You’re telling this one woman’s story. … It’s always been ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ her story.”
That’s one motive why after six seasons the collection selected to finish because it did: With June again in the home the place all of it started, beginning her memoirs — “The Handmaid’s Tale.” When Miller pitched that ultimate episode script, Moss says it made her cry.
“I love the idea that at the end is when she starts to tell the story that is the book, and the circular nature of that gives me chills,” she says. “The fact that she realizes that she has to tell it because it wasn’t all bad.”
However the ending additionally does yet another factor: It reveals how little is really resolved. June’s daughter Hannah continues to be trapped in Gilead, for instance. And followers of the collection know the motion will decide up 15 years later when “The Testaments,” primarily based on a 2019 sequel by Atwood and now in manufacturing, begins airing. (Moss gained’t say whether or not she’ll cameo.)
So that is an ending — simply not the ending. Now, the story leaves off, nonetheless centered on the girl who escaped the bonnet and cloak and never concerning the trappings of her enslavement. “For me, the ending is perfect,” says Moss. “I also don’t feel like it is an ending. The war is not over. June’s journey is not over.”
