‘A lot of it is coming true’: Inside the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale

For a series so relentlessly dark, the mood on the set of The Handmaid’s Tale is surprisingly light.

In a sprawling studio on Toronto’s outskirts, actors snap out of their characters’ miseries once the director calls cut. It feels like the final weeks of high school, with anticipation about next steps tinged with melancholy as friends are about to scatter.

Cast and crew grew close over nine years. (COVID-19 and strikes delayed production.) Now, the sixth and last season begins on April 8, with the finale dropping on May 27.

“There will be times this season where we almost feel like they really have arrived at a friendship,” says Australian actor Yvonne Strahovski, referring to her character Serena and Elisabeth Moss’ June. “Whether they’re both seeing it that way is another story. I would say it’s probably more on Serena’s side because of her desperation to just have someone in her corner. It’s a really interesting kind of relationship that flows and weaves around the storyline, and whether or not we see Serena go through a journey of redemption.”

Offred the handmaid (Elizabeth Moss) and Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) in season 1 of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Husbands have come and gone, but these two women remain at the drama’s centre. In the beginning, Serena held down June, the handmaid of the title, while her husband raped her. June, then known as Offred, was a breeding slave forced to repopulate this dystopian world. Violently kidnapped, June was determined to reunite her family and did whatever necessary, including murder.

Moss, who perfected a homicidal glare as June, recalls committing to the series while in Sydney shooting Top of the Lake. Intrigued after reading the pilot, she requested the second script.

Ann Dowd and Elisabeth Moss in the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale.

“I remember finishing it and being like, ‘It’s just too good. How am I going to say no to this?’” she says, en route to starring in and directing the finale. “The only reason I contemplated saying no is because it wasn’t that long before that I had finished Mad Men. So, I was not necessarily looking to do another TV series so quickly. Then, it just came down to the fact that I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it. Any time I thought about anyone else doing it, I got super jealous. Thank god I said yes.”

The Handmaid’s Tale was supposed to be just that – a tale – although Margaret Atwood said she invented none of the crimes against women. Forty years after publication, the international bestseller feels hauntingly prescient. Set in the near future in Gilead, a theocracy covering most of the United States, it imagines life after climate change, war and a fertility crisis ravaged the country. Religious zealots rule. Women have no control over their bodies. They’re also prohibited from driving or reading.

Some Americans escaped to Canada, which initially welcomed refugees. By the sixth season, however, that’s changing.

This season, action also unfolds in New Bethlehem, established as a kinder, gentler form of Gilead. Among its high commanders is Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), who is consistently empathetic, the rarest quality among men in Gilead. Like everyone involved, Whitford is painfully aware of the series’ relevance.

“Atwood talked recently about how she almost stopped writing this thing a couple of times because she just thought the premise was a little too much,” says Whitford. “And it’s been a very disturbing thing to be shooting a television show that really should be the most outrageous, unthinkable science fiction and a lot of it is coming true. It’s very, very scary.”

Nick (Max Minghella) and Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) in New Bethlehem.

All but the final two of the 10 episodes were available for screening, albeit with embargoes on plots. It’s fair to say the action picks up where it ended two-and-a-half years ago with the two leads on a train, hurtling toward unknown versions of freedom. Serena and June cradle their babies. Everyone’s motivation stays true to character.

“We’re not going to do anything for shock value,” says Eric Tuchman, co-showrunner, executive producer and writer. “I think we’re doing what feels right for each and every person on the show ...

“It’s really a now-or-never, do-or-die vibe this season in the fight against Gilead because we do have a finite end that we’re looking toward. But in the story itself, there’s an urgency and a sense that time is running out unless June and our characters take real action. And it’s action that I think the audience is waiting for, for six seasons.”

Elisabeth Moss’ June gets a slight makeover this season – she’s wearing pants for the first time.

Honoured with 15 Emmy Awards, the series reaches beyond TV. Its signature handmaids’ costume of red garments and white bonnets was adopted globally by women protesting losing reproductive freedoms.

Since life is so tightly regulated in Gilead, everyone wears uniforms, with colours broadcasting status: the handmaids’ blood-red, the wives’ cool teals, the domestics’ dull olives. This season, Serena’s wardrobe evolves. Don’t expect cheetah-print short shorts, but she’s different.

“My vision was that I felt that she is giving this opportunity to herself to right a lot of her wrongs,” says costume designer Leslie Kavanagh. “I felt like she’d looked at herself as her own commander, and so I did a lot of power suits. And we really changed the silhouettes for her in New Bethlehem, so she was allowed to wear pants, which has never been done before.”

Aunt Lydia (Anne Dowd) returns to search for Janine in season 6 of The Handmaid’s Tale.

“New Bethlehem is a seaside town, and so my inspiration for her closet, because she doesn’t wear just one specific colour this season, we have a range, and it was because I was sort of taking it from the interior of a seashell,” she says.

Serena’s also wearing asymmetrical clothes, which, in a world so carefully ordered, is a statement. Wives’ elevated positions grant flexibility on shades of teal and styles of modest dresses.

Still, Naomi (Ever Carradine) is a tad extra, with a higher heel and a fancier chignon. This season, Naomi has a prominent role, married to Commander Lawrence. No one would accuse her of suffering from excessive kindness.

“Being on the set of this show is transformative,” says Carradine. “You go there, and you really are in a different place, which is a credit to our production designer and our costume designer and our lighting designer – everything. It is a world that’s created.”

Creating these worlds required a team of 250 workers, says production designer Elisabeth Williams. This season, there’s time spent in No Man’s Land, which “has a series of abandoned buildings, and a lot of the rebels and a lot of various people hide out in these buildings,” says Williams. “Our scenic department, basically, created a space that had been damaged by water and cold – no heat, no electricity, water damage, etc. And so how do we do this in a building that is not ours, right? It’s a location. So there’s certain ways that we have to proceed.”

The crew once built a six-by-24-metre “Trump wall” separating Gilead from No Man’s Land. “It never made it into the show,” William says. “Those are the worst ones, the ones that we like that end up getting cut.”

Yet what’s on-screen feels real, perhaps never more so than now. The final season proves why fans are loyal to the taut drama. There’s love and hate, violence and romance, twists and resolutions delivered in wild yet believable scenes. A sequel, based on Atwood’s The Testaments, is in production. “So, you don’t say goodbye,” says Ann Dowd, whose character, Aunt Lydia, returns.

“We’ve had the same crew, pretty much the whole way,” says Bruce Miller, creator, writer, and executive producer, who ran the first five seasons and now oversees The Testaments. ”We certainly had the same cast, and that part of it is really hard to let go. The goal, I always thought, is, ‘I want to make the best TV show I’ve ever seen’, so we’ve done this.”

The first three episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale premiere on SBS On Demand on April 6, with the first two episodes screening on SBS on Wednesday, April 9, at 8.40pm.