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The stark reality of ‘The Handmaid's Tale' in Trump's America

The stark reality of ‘The Handmaid's Tale' in Trump's America

Yahoo27-05-2025

Margaret Atwood is often asked where she got the inspiration for her magnum opus, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' In interviews, she tends to answer the same way: 'The Handmaid's Tale' comes from real events. Everything in the novel, she'll say, looking straight into the camera or squarely into the face of a fan, has already occurred.
History repeats itself; that much we know. Everything in the novel is still occurring. It happened on the MSNBC franchise I write and produce: the Velshi Banned Book Club. Atwood sat down for an interview with host Ali Velshi and clearly elucidated that she was far more worried today than when she wrote the novel in 1985. Just one day later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Her worry, it seemed, was correctly placed.
It's hard not to think about that prescience, that condemning foresight, when watching the sixth and final season of the 15 Emmy award-winning Hulu adaptation of Atwood's novel.
While it's hard to say enough about Elizabeth Moss' stunning portrayal of June in Hulu's 'The Handmaid's Tale,' in this final season, which concluded Monday, what — or who — rings the truest to me in our present political moment is the character of Serena Joy, played by Yvonne Strahovski.
When the series debuted in 2017, there was no meaningful Trad Wife movement or any other so publicized return to traditionalism. We saw glimmers of an uptick in women-led conservatism, in the 52% of white women who voted for Donald Trump the first time he ran for office, for example. But Serena still felt paradoxical to me.
If you're somehow unfamiliar with the book, television, stage or film adaptation, 'The Handmaid's Tale' takes place in a near-future America called the Republic of Gilead, now governed by a theocratic dictatorship. With much of the population left infertile from environmental disasters, Gilead has implemented forced surrogacy and sexual slavery. (Indeed, the environmental component of the book has become alarmingly more relevant, but that is best left explored for another column.) Fertile 'handmaids,' a term and concept taken directly from the Book of Gensis in the Old Testament, are enslaved, raped by high-ranking officials, impregnated and then forced to surrender their children to their rapists and their complicit wives. Our hero, June, is one such handmaid. Strahovski's Serena, one of the show's most callous and complex antagonists, is the wife of Commander Waterford, to whom June is enslaved. The first season of the show follows the novel very closely, but the subsequent seasons are the creation of Bruce Miller with input from Atwood.
A true believer in Gilead, Serena is not a woman carried by the tide of a regressive Puritanical movement out of her control. Serena herself helped make the waves. It was her Cult of Domesticity-type polemic, her written work and public-facing persona, that helped create Gilead.
Season six opens with June and Serena, joined once again by fate, on a train with other women seeking refuge from Gilead. As the two women speak about the horrors they have experienced in Gilead with other refugees, someone exposes Serena by calling her by her notorious married name: Mrs. Waterford. The refugees want revenge, and Serena, now a war criminal for the role she played in Gilead, doesn't back down. 'Before Gilead, America was full of whores,' she tells them, with indignant eyes and gritted teeth. 'Women were getting raped and killed every day, and nobody cared, and that was your country. You were unfit. I am not responsible for your tragedies; your children were not taken from you, they weren't stolen, they were saved. God hated America because America turned their back on God, and God took your country away. God bless, America.'
Serena is always both an oppressor and a victim. This consistent duality, up until the very end when Serena marries another Gilead Commander under the false pretense that he is one of the good and progressive ones, is one of the most compelling aspects of the show. Why? Because Serena, as a phenomenon and as a woman, is real. Many American women perpetuate and then ultimately suffer under patriarchal structures. Their reasons for aligning themselves with an oppressor may be varied, but the outcome will always be the same. There is no room for women in a world like that. Serena proves that to us.
Like the increasingly popular conservative influencers who substantially profit from advocating a return to biblical subservience, Serena is incongruous. Crucially, 'The Handmaid's Tale' doesn't demand we view her in any one way. Serena is nuanced, willing to bend the rules of the society she created to meet her own needs and sometimes sympathetic. She, too, has suffered physical and emotional abuse.
In the final episode, Serena apologizes to June while boarding a bus bound for a U.N. refugee camp. Tearfully, holding her son, Noah, wrapped in blankets, she says, 'When I recall some of the things that were done to you and the things that I did and that I forced you to do, I'm ashamed.'
June forgives her, the two women embrace, and Serena gets on the bus. After, a U.S. Commander commends June's 'generous' forgiveness. June demurs and says, 'You have to start somewhere.' Like so much of this show and the source material, that small moment is thought-provoking. Is forgiveness the place to start?
Serena no longer feels improbable to me. Atwood warned us, in the pages and in the scenes of 'The Handmaid's Tale,' that women like Serena have existed and will continue to exist. I don't know why I didn't believe her.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com

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But without social media at the time, it's something the actor has to respond to now, at places like conventions, more than she even did at the time. The actor also shared that there were things she would have changed about her character, if she was able to a the time. "I definitely would have changed a few things about Kara, my character, and her story arc, and her personality and her wardrobe," Vandervoort said. "But I know that people liked what they did with her at the time the show was existing in the world." But one of the great TV disappointments is the cancellation of V after just two seasons. The sci-fi drama, based on the 1980s miniseries, about a extraterrestrial species arriving on earth. In addition to Vandervoort, the cast includes Elizabeth Mitchell, Morris Chestnut, Joel Gretsch, Morena Baccarin, Scott Wolf and Rekha Sharma. "I was upset. That was an incredible show, ABC, great ratings, incredible cast who have all gone on to do huge things, and we were just getting into the flow of it," Vandervoort said. "We never found out why it was cancelled. I think within a day we got three different answers as, oh it's going to be a miniseries now, we're going to do one more episode, and then suddenly we were just done." "I was having a great time, especially towards the end. I would have been playing two characters, my evil twin and myself. It was a wild show. I got to do some crazy stuff. I remember the most challenging part of shooting it was that my character couldn't share emotions. So you'd think that would be the easiest job in the world, but it was so hard for me, because you want to express through your eyes. And I grew up expressing, and that was an interesting, surprising challenge for me." But in 2016 Vandervoort had to pass on the "Supergirl" baton, in some ways, when the series Supergirl, starring Melissa Benoist as the title character, was released. "That came about because I met one of the producers at an award show in Los Angeles, and he was like, 'Hey, we have this new show. We'd love for you to kind of give the nod of approval and come on,'" Vandervoort explained. "I always wanted to see that character have her own show and I said, 'Can I be a villain and just look nothing like myself?' So they came up with Indigo." "It was the first season for [Melissa], so I made sure to just be respectful, and I'm just here for this job, but it's always fun to be a villain. It's more fun than being a superhero, because ... you're not set into a box. I was with Kara, because there were certain expectations for that character, but with Indigo, which was a made-up character, I could just be very sneaky." A project Vandervoort described as "one of the best experiences" in her life was a small budget short film called Age of Dysphoria, written by Vandervoort and Zoe Robyn, directed by Jessica Petelle. The main reason it's so important to Vandervoort is because she got to work with the late Gordon Pinsent. "He also was a relative of mine and he was my mentor since I was a kid," Vandervoort shared. "He came to my first real set on Goosebumps. Came into my trailer, gave me the spiel about how to behave, how to be respectful." "[I] was in awe the whole time we were filming that, just watching him. And it was surreal, because ... we'd never been on camera together, and it meant so much to me. ... I had trouble keeping the tears from falling just doing scenes with him. And the full circle part of it is Age of Dysphoria was his last project, and he was on my first project. So for whatever reason, it felt very serendipitous." What Vandervoort's resume proves is that even when her time on a project is limited, she makes an impact. That includes her role in The Handmaid's Tale Season 4, in which she plays Daisy, who worked at the original Jezebels, surviving after Winslow's death. "It was a short lived experience, but one of the highlights for me," Vandervoort said. "Being on a show that dealt with those topics that I was already a fan of, politically, I loved what they were doing, and Elisabeth Moss is just an idol for me." "I was petrified to do my scenes with her, and just kept quiet and watched her, and watched how she handled the set. ... She was just a boss. And I was so impressed and it really inspired me to want to get more behind the camera. We did our scenes together and I was like, 'Oh my God, I got through it.' ... She was lovely and sent me a DM [saying] how it was nice to work with me. ... You don't have to do that, so that made it a very special moment for me. I kept that message, screenshotted it, and then I look at it sometimes just to be like, after all these years, you're getting to work with people that you really admire." Taking the lead behind the camera is exactly what Vandervoort did with the short thriller film she wrote, directed and produced, My Soul to Take. It's about a young woman, played by Jenny Raven, as a software update on her phone unlocks a dream world. "I wrote My Soul to Take during COVID, I was working more than ever, which is odd, flying and shooting Christmas movies or whatever it was, and so I was quarantining when it was what you had to do, for 14 days in between each show," she explained. "So I was alone a lot and I had trouble sleeping, and so I downloaded a sleep app that sort of just walks you through a story and helps you fall asleep." "I just thought how disturbing it was, for whatever reason. I've always been into kind of darker M Night. Shyamalan, Hitchcock and Tim Burton. ... So instead of sleeping, like a crazy person I got up and wrote for three days, and wrote the first script I've finished. ... I sent it off to a producer friend and I was like, 'Do we have something here?' And she said yes. And we got the team together. I did an Indiegogo platform to raise all the funds for it, and sold all of my Smallville merchandise to fund it, and cast some incredible friends in the show. And then somehow got Colm Feore to say yes. We shot it in three days and it was terrifying." In terms of actually being able to get the funds to make the film, Vandervoort said it was "scary," but she was "determined" to make it work. "The fans showed up. They made it happen," she said. "I didn't think I could direct, and once I had the team together and I had my [director of photography], Kim Derko, ... she helped me through it the whole time. ... I maybe couldn't tell her the lens that I wanted, but I could tell her visually what I saw in my head. ... She was the technical side of it." What's compelling about My Soul to Take is the way that Vandervoort leaned into the idea of curating yourself for an audience, linked to particularly poignant messaging of being addicted to being constantly online, our dependence on technology, but ultimately feeling isolated. "Social media is a double-edged sword," Vandervoort said. "I use it. I'm guilty of it. I play the game. But at that time and even now, I really didn't love what it was doing to my self-esteem and to the thoughts I had about myself, and my career." "You'd see other actors posting their announcements, they've been cast in this, and like anyone you want to take a break from feeling like a failure or comparing yourself to someone else. And so I think, at that time, I was 14 days in an apartment, I couldn't leave, I was on social media and it was just making me miserable. So I think it stemmed from that. I'd also met an actor who made a living from social media and I found that frustrating, and it's just this whole other world. And that's where the 'Alice in Wonderland' aspect of My Soul to Take came in with this fake world, where it seems like everyone's doing well and happy, when in reality people just aren't posting when they're in the fetal position crying in the shower. Life isn't cultivated, it's lived, and why are we watching people live a fake version of it, or a highlight reel? So there was a lot going on in my head at the time, for sure."

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