‘The Handmaid's Tale' Will Have an ‘Honest Conclusion' With Series Finale
The Handmaid's Tale is coming to an end after six seasons — and the series finale won't sugarcoat the story.
During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, coshowrunners Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman teased the final two episodes of the show.
"I think we can expect an honest conclusion to the story. We keep using the word honest because we try our best to be realistic," Tuchman noted. "What would happen in real life — and what we hope people take away — is this feeling of hopefulness and resilience that June and many of the other characters have demonstrated and will demonstrate in the last couple of episodes."
With June (Elisabeth Moss) finally leading the resistance, viewers should expect genuine twists and turns, with Tuchman adding, "When you're up against an oppressive regime and when your rights are stripped away, you just never stop fighting. You keep going. Hopefully people will draw some optimism and feel empowered by what plays out."
Everything 'The Handmaid's Tale' Cast Has Said About the Show Ending After Season 6
Chang, meanwhile, specifically praised the ninth episode of the season.
"It is really the most epic episode of the entire series. It's incredibly satisfying because we've teased even in the marketing that the revolution is here," she explained. "You really get that in episode 9 and it comes to the forefront. It is so emotional and amazing."
After wrapping the series, Chang told Us she found herself rewatching that specific episode as a way to 'pump myself up.'
" It is really like a tour de force. We wanted audience members to be jumping out of their seats and so excited, so happy and to feel so good," she added. "It's amazing. Our fans are amazing that they have stuck with us through a lot of bad moments. So they, more than anyone, deserve some feel good moments. That really gets delivered in episode 9."
Based on Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name, The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a dystopian future where low fertility rates have resulted in women being forcefully assigned to men for the sole purpose of bearing children. In addition to Moss, Samira Wiley, Yvonne Strahovski, Madeline Brewer, Ann Dowd, O-T Fagbenle, Max Minghella and Amanda Brugel have led the cast since the show's premiere.
'The Handmaid's Tale' Cast: See the Hulu Show's Stars Then and Now
Executive producer Warren Littlefield also called the show's finale "really satisfying," sharing with Us in April, "Living in the world of Gilead for our audience is sometimes a tough journey. But I think their patience will be rewarded because this final year is ordinary women doing extraordinary things. The revolution is here and they're highly effective. There's joy. Is there still a Gilead? Yeah. But we celebrate what they accomplish and I think it'll be very satisfying for the audience."
Viewers, however, shouldn't expect to get all their questions answered.
"We are going to begin a journey right away with The Testaments. That is still a world that has Gilead. But it's a completely different point of view," he teased. "We will satisfy and really deliver triumphantly for our audience who's been with us through six seasons of The Handmaid's Tale. They will want and be curious to see more and see where The Testaments goes."
The Handmaid's Tale airs Tuesdays on Hulu.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
UPI
10 minutes ago
- UPI
Dale Moss, Lexi Young among 'Bachelor in Paradise' Season 10 cast
Dale Moss will return to reality television for "Bachelor in Paradise" Season 10. File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo June 10 (UPI) -- ABC is announcing the cast of Bachelor in Paradise Season 10. Dale Moss, who became engaged to Season 16 Bachelorette Clare Crawley, is among the singles looking for love in Costa Rica. "I'm really head down with travel and work and projects and things like that," he told Us Weekly. "But I definitely realized that there's more out there and sometimes you have to remove yourself from certain situations to get more clarity on that." A reel featuring the incoming singles was posted to the reality television show's official Instagram account Tuesday. "I may have caught footballs for a living, but catching hearts -- that's a natural talent," Moss says in that clip. The series follows "fan favorites from The Bachelor franchise" as they mingle and date one another. Other cast members include Jeremy Simon, Jonathan Johnson, Alexe-Anne Godin, Bailey Brown, Brian Autz, Hakeem Moulton, Jessica Edwards, Justin Glaze, Katherine Izzo, Kyle Howard, Lexi Young, Riquerdy Marinez, Sam McKinney, Spencer Conley and Zoe McGrady. Season 10 arrives on ABC July 7.
Yahoo
10 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Dan Fogelman and team on the making of ‘Paradise': ‘It only works if you have talented people who you trust'
Coming up with a unique idea for a show is hard enough — bringing it to life is another challenge entirely. So when it came to making Hulu's Paradise a reality (or is it?), showrunner Dan Fogelman turned to his trusted team, many of whom he had worked with on This Is Us. Having that shorthand among his lieutenants — including executive producer John Hoberg, directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, composer Siddhartha Khosla, costume designer Sarah Bram, and make-up department head Zoe Hay — "it's everything," said Fogelman. "For me, speaking selfishly and personally, it allows me to focus on the more important part of my job, the part I'm good at, which is writing and editing and not worrying about how the show gets made. Because I know I have great people making it. As I've gotten further along in my career, I like giving my stuff to smart people to interpret it and see what they do with it." More from GoldDerby 'Thank you for dying': 'Squid Game' creator, cast share deeper meanings of hit Netflix series, reveal on-set flower ceremonies for 'killed' actors 'It's church with butt jokes': Kevin Smith looks back as 'Dogma' turns 25 Mariah Carey and Jamie Foxx steal the spotlight at 2025 BET Awards: Watch highlights and see the full winners list Here, those smart people reveal the inside secrets of the making of Paradise, from the biggest fights in the writers room to hiding the murderer in plain sight. Gold Derby: Dan, what was the mission you gave to the team to create the world of Paradise? Dan Fogelman: Almost everybody here worked with us on This Is Us, and John and Glenn and I have done multiple projects together. And so my thing is my job is done when I write the script, and then I turn it over to smarter people and say, 'Figure out how to make this thing.' We had a lot of conversations about how we were going to bury the secret at the end of the pilot. That was where a lot of attention went, and that involves every department here. The challenge was obviously obfuscating the world that you thought you were in versus the world you were [actually] in for 58 minutes of the pilot. And that was the biggest challenge, I think, of the entire undertaking. John Hoberg, how did you approach that with the scripts? John Hoberg: We have a great room of writers, and so there was so much discussion about it. How do you make this show post-apocalyptic, but also have this humanity in there? That was always in there, the flashing back and finding the heart and the origin where these people come from. There was always that goal of how do we dig deeper into these characters and find what motivates them. There was a lot of math, too — I can't tell you how much! You should see the writers room with the cards up [on the wall] trying to track a murder mystery, but also the emotional journey of all these characters. It was a lot of very passionate discussions with writers who really, really care about what fits into what pieces. Dan and John, what were some of the most passionate discussions? Fogelman: My God, we had so many debates! I always try and hire writers who don't just sit on their hands when they take issue with something. But they could also just send you in circles for days arguing and debating stuff. [We debated] any number of things, like the really technical stuff that lives underneath the show that we're really exploring in the second season right now, which is how the bunker is powered. There are conversations about geothermal and nuclear energy that boggle my brain — and I really kind of check out. Hoberg: If I hear the word 'systems level' one more time, I'm walking. Fogelman: And then it's just big picture questions like, 'Can we kill Billy Pace that quickly in the show?' which are more conceptual. There's the sci-fi conversations, and then there's the theoretical conversations about character. We only have eight episodes, and where are you going to choose to tell your story, who's getting back stories, which are worth it. I like to take our big ideas and move them all the way up to like a third, fourth, fifth episode and then where does that leave us. Hoberg: The killing of Billy, was something that caused, I think, the biggest fights in the room. I feel like Stephen Markley was about to walk out on that one. Fogelman: Yeah, that was a big one. John and Glenn, as directors, what tone did you want to set in the pilot that would then play off throughout the season that you could then revisit in the finale? John Requa: Well, they may have had a lot of discussions in the writer's room about this world, but they didn't have enough. So we said, let's have a hundred more. We had to design the world, we had 100 meetings about cars and that's not an exaggeration. I had a screaming match in our office with Steve Beers, the line producer, about what color the cars would be. Fogelman: There were lots of conversations with John about cars. Requa: It's the hardest part, but it was the best part. Building a world — what a thrill. Early on, we'd been hearing about the show for a while in different forms. The first time, I think, Dan, you were talking about it as like a movie about a Secret Service guy and a retired president. And then it evolved. So when we read the script, it was wow, this is a really big swing. That just was thrilling — terrifying but thrilling. Sarah, how did you approach building the world from a costume perspective, knowing that you were going to be dressing people for two different lives, the pre and post-apocalyptic world? Sarah Bram: If there's a word for how we went about that, it has to do with restraint. We thought through what clothing might be in the dome and how people might wear that clothing without making it too much of a story about like, my God, crazy apocalypse. It was about keeping humanity to it, so it doesn't just become a visual story about the insanity of this idea that people may live underneath the earth in a dome. So it was about keeping it something that people could really relate to. That meant being very true, but maybe with really good tailoring. Zoe, did people bring lipstick with them to the dome? Zoe Hay: We wanted to make sure that people had their creature comforts with them, that there would be things down there to make people feel better, to feel calm. Women and men would have those products available to them in a limited amount. We equated it to a CVS in 1984. Glenn Ficarra: Everybody brought something there, brought stuff there in bulk. It's stuff that you'll notice if you look hard enough, but the cars, they were just bought in bulk. It's only the billionaires who probably got all the good stuff stacked up in the basement. So you didn't have as many fights about lipstick as you did about cars? Fogelman: One of the things that's very cool about this show is that there was more big-picture thought than necessarily you're seeing at every moment on screen. Our department heads and our directors had rules of our world. We have Bibles and papers that were written on the kind of infrastructure politically of the world. You don't see all of it in every frame, but hopefully it has a subcutaneous effect on the entire thing because the people who were making it had a lot of thought behind everything. Hoberg: I remember hour-long conversations about what television programs did they let people watch down there? It never made it to air, but just every detail was discussed. Fogelman: There's a scene where the kids are listening to music in the library. And the thought behind it was if there was too much pop culture from before and not enough created down below, at a certain point it could devastate people because everything you're listening to and seeing is made by dead people ostensibly. And so the thought was that there was a certain amount of media in houses and in rooms and in programs. But if you wanted it, you sought it out at a special place in the library. You just see a kid listening to music in the library, in the listening section, and that's where Cal goes to make his final mixtape. Speaking of music, Sid, what themes did you want to evoke with your score? Siddhartha Khosla: I was just trying to make Glenn, John and Dan happy! The beauty of working with these guys is that they treat music like it's anything else we've just talked about, like discussing it early on before even shooting a frame of anything. Dan sent me a script and then I wrote this little melody off of that script. The guys seemed to like it, and then we spent several months trying to develop it together. John would send a text saying, 'Hey, can you write me a piece of music that feels like we are trapped and we can't escape?' I recorded violins and cellos and percussion and all sorts of other instruments and looped them and messed them up. I got to feel like I'm in a band again working with these guys. So that's always special. On most television and film, composers come in really late in the process. But getting to come in really early in the process allowed us to experiment. Not only had you worked with the crew before, but obviously also Sterling K. Brown. What did he bring to the role? Fogelman: Oh, he's awful. Terrible guy, terrible actor. [Laughs.] He's the best. I mean, he's such a force as an actor. I love him in this role. It's so different than what we had just done together for so long. And he's a tremendous leader on set. He leads with his infectious laughter. It's a fun place to go to work because the most famous, biggest force on the set is the world's nicest guy. And everybody follows that lead, so it's a real pleasure always coming to set when Sterling's there. There's never any tension. And he's so good at his job. It's very rare that you find somebody who's as good at their job who's also that nice and generous. So he makes it easy. John, how did you approach writing episode 107, which was such a complicated one with its multiple timelines? Hoberg: I was lucky that one came up for me — there's a batting order. I wanted that one so bad because it had everything that I love in it. It really was just trying to find little bits of humanity sprinkled throughout that so people aren't superheroes at all. There's a speech writer who's mad on the last day of the world that a callback in his speech is being cut. Someone's annoyed that the CIA is interrupting them in front of the president. I felt like finding those little moments of humanity help at least me ground how I felt as I was writing it. Like these are actually really people in this thing and they're all in over their head. Zoe, is there one look you're proudest of? Hay: I would have to say the librarian. That was such a challenge from the very beginning before we even started shooting, Dan asked us to do a test on him, and I think we came up with about maybe 20 different looks for him, different mustaches, beards, wigs, all kinds of stuff. And then we sort of settled on the few transitions that he had, but he's a tall guy and it's hard finding disguises for him where you could lose him in the crowd visually. I think we succeeded because I don't think anybody really spotted him. Fogelman: It was such a big part of it because he's in the first episode as the assassin and then he's living in plain sight as a different character throughout the entire series. If you start going, oh, it's the librarian, it ruins it. Occasionally a person would write on Reddit, I think they're in an underground bunker; once in a blue moon somebody would hit on something. But I don't think anybody ever saw him. We had a premiere screening months ago and his own mother and agent said, we just wish we could see one that you were in — and he goes, well, I was actually in that one. And his own family didn't realize that he was the guy that played the assassin after having watched the pilot. So that was very cool. because the whole thing would have fallen on its face if it hadn't worked. Was it always intended that it was going to be him? Fogelman: I didn't know who it was going to be at the very beginning when I wrote the pilot. But then right when we gathered the writers room, one of our writers said, I think it would be cool if it was someone hiding in plain sight. What if it was a librarian? And then we're like, how are we going to do that? Then we were casting with an eye on who could pull off the performance and also who could be malleable to what Zoe was going to do to him. Requa: Some faces aren't that hideable. There were so many conversations that ended with … 'and if this doesn't work, we're [screwed].' You really do like to write yourself into corners. Fogelman: Once in a while, I'll think to myself, God, it would be really nice to just write something linear. Ficarra: We always say that. What did you all learn from making the first season that you're bringing now to the second season? Ficarra: Cut the script down early. I still haven't learned. Hoberg: I haven't learned that. Fogelman: One of the things is, you learn by the response to show. And so obviously we end our first season with Sterling heading out into the world. And that was always part of the plan. But you start learning that people love our bunker and they love our cast down there and they love the dynamics of those folks. So for season two, we're going to be out sometimes with Sterling, but we're also going to make sure we live with the stuff people love in the bunker as well. And finding that balance. It was an exciting thing to discover that it's not just that people are tuning out when Sterling's not on camera on his A storyline. People love Sinatra and Sarah Shahi and Jon Beavers and James Marsden. They love all the storylines in the world that was created down below. Give me one word to describe Season 2. Fogelman: It's very ambitious. Hoberg: I was gonna say bigger. Requa: Subjective. Ficarra: Surprising. Khosla: It's incredibly cool. I've worked on the first couple already and it's awesome. This article and video are presented by Disney/Hulu. Best of GoldDerby Gary Oldman on 'Slow Horses' being 'an extraordinary show to work on' and 'one of the highlights of my career' Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate on playing best friends in 'Dying for Sex': 'It was love at first sight' Brandon Scott Jones on CBS' 'Ghosts': 'I enjoy playing characters that are desperate' Click here to read the full article.
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
OPEC boss slams net-zero targets, promotes big future for oil in Calgary speech
The secretary-general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries says the world's thirst for oil will continue for decades to come and investment in the sector is necessary to meet those needs. Haitham al-Ghais made his remarks in a speech to the Global Energy Show in Calgary on Tuesday, at a time when oil prices are sagging and experts predict they could fall further later this year. "Simply put, ladies and gentlemen, there is no peak in oil demand on the horizon. The fact that oil demand keeps rising, hitting new records year on year, is a clear example of what I'm saying," he said in his speech. Primary energy demand is forecast to rise by 24 per cent between now and 2050, he said, surpassing 120 million barrels of oil a day. Currently, oil demand is around 103 million barrels per day. "Meeting this ever-rising demand will only be possible with adequate and timely and necessary investments in the oil industry," he said, pointing to the need for $17.4 trillion US in investment over the next 25 years. Praise for Alberta oil and gas The secretary-general used his speech to compliment Alberta's oil and gas industry for its ability to grow production over the years, its technological improvements, and its role as a leader in developing carbon capture and storage facilities. He concluded his address by stating OPEC takes climate change "very, very seriously," and each of its member countries have signed on to the Paris climate accord. Still, he criticized net-zero targets by companies and countries as "unrealistic," "fixated on deadlines" and "detached from reality." Instead, he said the world should be focused on reducing emissions and using all forms of energy to meet the needs of the world's growing population. In 2024, emissions from the energy sector grew by 0.8 per cent compared to 2023, according to the International Energy Agency, while the global economy expanded by more than three per cent. In Canada, the federal government is already on pace to miss its 2030 target to cut carbon emissions by at least 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Challenging times The speech comes at a time when the oilpatch is confronting weak commodity prices and many companies are pulling back on investment. OPEC countries are producing more this year, along with more output from Canada, the U.S. and Guyana. Last month, the Vienna-based cartel agreed to raise output by 411,000 barrels a day in June, speeding up the gradual return of 2.2 million barrels a day. For context, Canada produces about five million barrels per day in total. At the same time, global consumption of oil is not rising as initially expected because of slowing global trade. "Demand is not falling, but we are in a period where demand growth is weak. In fact, if you take out the COVID year of 2020, the global financial crisis of '08-'09, this looks like it could be the weakest year of growth since 2001," said Jim Burkhard, global head of crude oil research with S&P Global Commodity Insights, in an interview with CBC News. Big drop forecasted North American oil prices are averaging about $65 US per barrel in recent days, but S&P's latest oil forecast released this week anticipates prices could fall into the high-$40s per barrel later this year. "We could see a significant difference in price by the end of the year compared with where we are right now. A lot depends on the economy, of course, and the concern about tariffs and OPEC+ can alter their decisions at any time. But right now, on current trends, it looks like there's going to be a lot more supply relative to demand later this year," he said. More than 30,000 people from 100 countries are expected to attend the Global Energy Show in Calgary this week.
