Abe Friedtanzer
Over the course of its five seasons to date, The Handmaid’s Tale has taken audiences on a grueling journey filled with devastation and loss, but not immune to small victories. As the show goes on hiatus and preparations are made for a sixth and final season, the last episode of the fifth season, “Safe,” shifts the balance of power and sets a course for one last daring attempt to save what might be left of the legacy of the United States.
Ahead of that story-shifting season-ender, Awards Radar had the chance to speak with creator Bruce Miller about some of the major plot points. *Spoiler alert: please be sure to finish season five before watching this interview.*
Miller began by addressing what he had mapped out when the show started:
“It’s from a book written by Margaret Atwood, and there were a lot of things in the book that were just mentioned or nodded to, and that really has been a lot of our guide in terms of what the world looks like. But honestly, no, I didn’t see where the show was going. I follow June, in the hands of Elisabeth Moss. If I just wrote a script, and then wrote another script and another script, they wouldn’t advance. But I have all this team of artists… who are all adding something on top. So then I go back and look. That’s what really steers me, not what I did, but what they did with what I did.”
On one of this season’s most fascinating characters, Commander Lawrence, Miller expressed:
“Bradley infuses Lawrence with, more than anything, a fantastic sense of ego. Not in a bad way, but just in a way of seeing the whole world as your toy, your plaything. I think that the interesting thing is that the same thing that causes him to seem human is the thing that gets him into trouble, which is, he’s got a big mouth, and he doesn’t have so much of a filter between his head and his mouth, and as he gets more comfortable he gets more talky. As he gets more talky, he gets more in trouble, which was the route last time. Everybody says, he’s getting into power when he’s done this before, and it didn’t work out. He ended up back in his house not going to any meetings. Don’t under or overestimate him. He describes a lot of what happened the last time when things went septic, and he’s doing all of those things again. He thinks he’s the chess master when he’s just another pawn in the game, and he will never, ever, with his ego, stop thinking that he has control over events.”
Watch the full conversations below:
All five seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale are now streaming on Hulu.
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