Not long ago Yvonne Strahovski, who plays beautiful, ruthless, deeply complicated Serena on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” was forced to watch early scenes of her character’s cruelty.
Of course, Serena was being cruel to long-suffering heroine June (Elisabeth Moss). It wasn’t a nice experience to relive.
“I was dying. I wanted to vomit! It was horrible,” Strahovski said in an interview, of footage played at a panel event. “To go back and look at that was insanely jarring.”
To which longtime “Handmaid’s” fans would likely reply: Tell us about it, Serena! We’ve gone through hell and back ourselves, for 56 episodes.
Rapes. Mass hangings. Shootings. Torture. Kids torn from mothers, tongues from mouths. And more. The searing Hulu drama about a totalitarian state that treats women as property, based on the Margaret Atwood novel, may have been brilliant. But the brilliance came from abject darkness.
So praise be, loyal fans: Creators of the show felt your pain. They want you to know that this, the sixth and final season, will be different.
It will still be Gilead, to be sure. As Bradley Whitford’s ever-quotable Commander Lawrence would say: “Gilead’s gonna Gilead.” But it will be faster-paced, and more satisfying. There will be catharsis and redemption — rewards for all that fan loyalty.
Yes. Don’t take it from us (though we’ve previewed the first eight episodes). Take it from June herself.
Moss, who not only stars but directs four episodes this season, says it was around season 4 or 5 when creators realized they wanted to move away “from too much in-your-face darkness.”
Of course, the show’s hardly turned into a sitcom.
“We wouldn’t be ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ if we didn’t have those dark moments,” she says. “It would be dishonest.” But, she says, “We did want to bring in more lightness and levity.”
Helpful in that regard: Whitford’s whipsmart characterization of Commander Lawrence, who tosses off memorable one-liners like “Serena, are you suffering from an irony deficiency?”
Whitford confirms a reporter’s suspicions that he’d come up with that one himself. “I’ve been telling that joke for years,” he says. “I pitched it … and I’m very proud of it.”
Eric Tuchman, showrunner with Yahlin Chang, recognizes people had started to find the show “a hard watch … and that was honestly a way we as writers were beginning to feel.”
So, along with shunning the most extreme cruelty, the show has abandoned what he calls the “more languid pacing” of the past.
“We had a lot of stories we wanted to tell in 10 episodes,” Tuchman says. “We wanted the season to have a feeling of momentum and to be propulsive.”
Adds Chang: “It was a now-or-never thing — this is the last chance we get to tell these stories with these characters.”
We can likely expect fewer endless gazes into June’s tearful eyes. There’s stuff to get done.
A number of characters have flirted with the other side, morally, in the show — good people doing terrible things, terrible people occasionally doing good. Well, it’s time for everyone to take a stand.
“People don’t stay the same,” Moss says. “Someone’s gonna go to the dark side, someone’s gonna go to the light. But … you can’t just plod along, avoiding choosing a side. At a certain point, you have to choose.”
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