Latest news with #HandmaidsTale
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Variety report claims 'The Boys' and 'Handmaid's Tale' imaginary fascist worlds are becoming reality
Michael Schneider, executive editor for Variety's TV section, claimed in an article published Friday that the imaginary fascist worlds of Amazon Prime's "The Boys" and Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale" are becoming reality. Schneider argued the fictitious worlds created in the TV series "don't seem so far-fetched anymore" in President Donald Trump's America. "The Boys," a TV series based on a group of superheroes who cause more chaos than they do good, recently rolled out a marketing campaign jokingly referring to the show as a documentary. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, showrunner Eric Kripke confirmed the series' "evil-Superman-style character," Homelander, was created as a "direct Trump analogue." The Variety editor wrote that the superhero series "feels a lot less fictional every season it's on the air." 'Handmaid's Tale' Showrunners Say Their Series' 'Warning' Was 'Ignored' Based On Trump's Re-election "That's why the cheeky 'The Boys' ads tout its campaign for 'Best Documentary Series.'" he wrote. "Sure, the 'documentary' is crossed out, and 'drama' is hastily written above it, like it was a last-minute mistake. But we've been making that joke for years." Read On The Fox News App Schneider then shifted his focus to "The Handmaid's Tale," claiming the frightening events that take place in the series "don't seem so far-fetched anymore." He featured quotes from the show's creators to reinforce his point that the authoritarian dystopia featured in the series is now becoming reality. The show's executive producer, Eric Tuchman, recalled that some writers for the show were concerned about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned when Trump won the presidency in 2016. He felt that it sounded "kind of alarmist and extremist … I could not have been more wrong, obviously." Tuchman claimed the show's creators weren't focused on calling attention to "the political situation in the country," but said "it was just uncanny how much it ended up being a mirror of what was happening in the real world." Another showrunner, Yahlin Chang, said before she joined the production, she "did all this research into what happens when parents and children are separated in conflict zones." She conducted this research in preparation for a scene in which one of the characters is allowed to visit her estranged daughter for only 10 minutes under government supervision. America Now Worse Than 'Make Believe' 'Handmaid's Tale' Because Of Abortion, Actress Claims "My research focused on conflict zones like Liberia, Cambodia, Bosnia. I never imagined that that would happen in our own country. But by the time I wrote this scene in 2017, and by the time it aired in 2018, it aired the week that we were separating parents and children at the border," Chang said. She claimed "by doing research on what authoritarian regimes do," the show's creators "somehow predicted what would happen" in the real world. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture Schneider noted that, "Ironically, just as things get even worse here in the United States," the imaginary land of Gilead in the series is poised for a revolution. In closing, the Variety editor left readers with his hopes for the future. "A revolution and a happy ending for 'The Handmaid's Tale?' Here's hoping the real world can imitate art in this way, too," Schneider article source: Variety report claims 'The Boys' and 'Handmaid's Tale' imaginary fascist worlds are becoming reality
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Elisabeth Moss on 'The Handmaid's Tale' finale moment that gave her chills
Red cloaks. Stiff white bonnets. Bent heads. If there's a single image that Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale" leaves audiences with as it ends its six-season run this week, it's this one: That of women in a dystopian anti-America called Gilead, evolving from anonymous sexual slaves into rebels, warriors and, sometimes, survivors. But for "Handmaid's" creator Bruce Miller and star Elisabeth Moss, who also directed several episodes in the final season, the series, based on the 1985 book by Margaret Atwood, was never about what the women wore. It was about the women inside the color-coded uniforms. "June started out as a normal person, a mom, a wife," says Moss, whose other long-running roles include 'The West Wing' and 'Mad Men.' She won an Emmy for playing the "Handmaid's" title character in 2017, the same year the show took home the first drama series prize for a streaming show. "Then [June] had to shut down and become something that I don't think she wasn't proud of," Moss continues. "But I feel she comes out of that into a place of true heroism, where she is able to be herself, be generous, forgive, inspire other people, lead — but also be vulnerable, ask questions, not know everything." Miller, who stepped back from showrunning duties for the final season, with Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang taking over, especially wanted to ensure that as a man, he was telling a female-forward story from the female point of view — both in the writers' room and on camera. Read more: Commentary: From 'The Last of Us' to 'Handmaid's Tale,' women are angry and vengeful. Good "I'm very mindful of the fact that I'm a boy, and who do I think I am?" he says, adding that winning the Emmy boosted his confidence in being a man telling a story about women's rights. (The series has 15 Emmys total.) "Definitely, when you win an Emmy it helps you feel a bit less like you have one penis over the limit." Knowing that, Miller says he centered the story on June and Moss alike, adjusting camera angles to focus on her point of view — but lowered to an eye level that corresponded with the actress' 5-foot-3 height. "The crowd scenes get much more scary" when you do that, he says. "I want to see the world not just through June's eyes — but also Lizzie's eyes, as much as she's able to show me those things." Meanwhile, Moss used roles as executive producer and director to focus on the show's look and how June came across on camera. Frequently, she's shown smoldering with fury or dark intent, gazing up from under her brows with a lowered chin, something Moss says she lifted from Stanley Kubrick's films. "That is 'Clockwork Orange,'" she says. "I am certainly not the first person to do that look." But she might be one of very few actresses to convey it onscreen. "It's definitely not something women do [on camera]," she says. "Women aren't allowed to get angry. [June] uses her anger and weaponizes it at so many points during the show — and by the final season, she knows when to do that and when not to." The journey June, Elisabeth and "Handmaid's" have been on began at an uncomfortably synergistic time in American politics: Amid the airing of a series about women subject to state regulation of their bodily autonomy, real-world politicians were successfully rolling back women's reproductive rights. In 2018, protestors began showing up at real-world events in those handmaid-red cloaks and white bonnets, putting the show in an unexpected spotlight. "Art does have an impact," says Moss about that kind of a response, but suggests that repurposing the show's images, outfits or story in service of real-world politics misses a key element of the series. "I don't think any of us necessarily set out, when you're making a TV show, to [make a political statement], because that's the wrong way to go about it. You're telling this one woman's story. … It's always been 'The Handmaid's Tale,' her story." Read more: Under her eye: The blessings of Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia in 'The Handmaid's Tale' That's one reason why after six seasons the series chose to end as it did: With June back in the house where it all began, starting her memoirs — "The Handmaid's Tale." When Miller pitched that final episode script, Moss says it made her cry. "I love the idea that at the end is when she starts to tell the story that is the book, and the circular nature of that gives me chills," she says. "The fact that she realizes that she has to tell it because it wasn't all bad." But the ending also does one more thing: It shows how little is truly resolved. June's daughter Hannah is still trapped in Gilead, for example. And fans of the series know the action will pick up 15 years later when "The Testaments," based on a 2019 sequel by Atwood and now in production, begins airing. (Moss won't say whether she'll cameo.) So this is an ending — just not the ending. Now, the story leaves off, still focused on the woman who escaped the bonnet and cloak and not about the trappings of her enslavement. "For me, the ending is perfect," says Moss. "I also don't feel like it is an ending. The war is not over. June's journey is not over." Get the Envelope newsletter, sent three times a week during awards season, for exclusive reporting, insights and commentary. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Taylor Swift's 'Handmaid's Tale' song fuels 'Reputation TV' rumors. So when are the AMAs?
It's time to put your clown makeup on (again), Swifties. If there's one album Taylor Swift fans have been begging to be re-released, it's her sixth studio album, "Reputation." The album, originally released in 2017, is among the final two Swift has yet to announce her re-recordings for, along with her debut album, "Taylor Swift." Fans began theorizing "Reputation (Taylor's Version)" might be announced at the 2025 American Music Awards after Swift's website supposedly updated, listing out the categories to spell "AMAs." Then, to add more fuel to the fire, "Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor's Version)" premiered on a recent episode of "The Handmaid's Tale," which came six days before the award show (aka the same album number as "Reputation"). The AMAs would make a perfect stage for the announcement, since Swift, who holds the record for most AMAs with 40, is up for six awards. So, when are the 2025 American Music Awards? Here's what you need to know. The 2025 American Music Awards, hosted by singer Jennifer Lopez, will broadcast live from Las Vegas on Monday, May 26. Fans can watch the award show on CBS and stream on Paramount+ starting at 8 p.m. ET. Since anything Swift does is rarely a coincidence, fans first speculated that her alleged website update hints at her long-awaited "Reputation (Taylor's Version)" getting announced during the AMAs. Fans noticed her website lists the sections, Apparel, Music, Accessories, Sale, to spell out AMAs, making it fair to theorize something is going down at the award show. To push theories further, in the midst of a content drought, Swift rose up from the ashes for "Execution," episode 9 of season 6 of "The Handmaid's Tale," which aired May 20. During the show, the haunting organ notes for "Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor's Version)," from "Reputation," played for 2 minutes and 16 seconds. So will she do it? Honestly, anything is possible, but it'd make perfect sense considering she's up for six AMA awards (a significant number since "Reputation" is her sixth studio album) and because she's had a knack for announcing upcoming albums at award shows. Swift announced her latest album, "The Tortured Poets Department," in 2024 after she won the Grammy for best pop vocal album for "Midnights." Rapper Kendrick Lamar earned a leading 10 nominations for the American Music Awards on April 23, including nods for Artist of the Year and Song of the Year for his Grammy-winning diss track "Not Like Us." Post Malone landed eight nominations, including Favorite Male Country Artist and Favorite Country Album for "F-1 Trillion." He previously won AMAs in rap/hip hop and pop/rock categories. Next on the list were Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Shaboozey, who earned seven nominations each. Taylor Swift, who has picked up more AMAs than any other artist over her career, received six nominations in 2025. Click here to see the full nominee list. Fans can vote for their favorite artists by visiting Fans can also vote for all categories on the American Music Awards Instagram page. This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Taylor Swift 'Handmaid's Tale' song fuels AMAs hype. When are they?
Forbes
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
American Music Awards: Will Taylor Swift Attend—And Announce ‘Reputation' (Taylor's Version)?
Devoted fans of billionaire pop star Taylor Swift, known for planting clues to her upcoming music releases, have developed their latest theory: that Swift may announce the long-awaited re-recorded version of her 2017 album 'Reputation' at the American Music Awards on Monday night, though it's unclear whether she will attend. "Look What You Made Me Do" (Taylor's Version) was featured in a trailer for "The Handmaid's Tale" ... More last week. (Photo by) Swifties believe the singer has hidden the number '26'—which they think is a reference to May 26, the date of the American Music Awards—in various places to suggest she may announce new music during the awards ceremony. Fans have noticed some merchandise on Swift's website is discounted at 26% off, while the order of links—Apparel, Music, Accessories, Sale—spell out 'AMAs.' Swifties have crunched the numbers, concluding Swift has posted photos from the 'Reputation' set of the Eras Tour 26 times, and they noticed her total Instagram post count, 676, is equal to 26 squared. Last week, the not-yet-released re-recorded version of 'Look What You Made Me Do,' a song from 'Reputation,' was included in a trailer for an upcoming episode of 'The Handmaid's Tale,' though the trailer offered no indication of when the song or album would be released. Swift is also known for using awards shows to announce her forthcoming releases: She announced 'Midnights' at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2022 and 'The Tortured Poets Department' at the Grammy Awards in 2024. The American Music Awards air Monday, May 26, at 8 p.m. EDT on CBS and Paramount+. This year's ceremony is hosted by Jennifer Lopez, who is also slated to perform, with other performers including Janet Jackson, Gwen Stefani, Benson Boone and Renée Rapp. Kendrick Lamar leads the nomination tally with 10, followed by Post Malone with eight. Swift, who has won the most AMAs of all time with 40, has six nominations this year. Swift announced in 2019 she would re-record her first six albums after her former label, Big Machine Records, was purchased by Scooter Braun, a record label executive and former artist manager, giving him the rights to Swift's master recordings. Swift accused Braun of bullying her and stripping her of the rights to her work, though Braun pushed back and claimed he offered her the opportunity to buy her masters back. Swift began releasing her re-recorded music, subtitled (Taylor's Version), in 2021, and to date she has re-released four of her first six albums, with only 'Reputation' and her debut album, 'Taylor Swift,' left. All of her re-recorded albums have topped the charts, and they include previously unreleased songs. Swift has long teased fans with clues and Easter eggs hidden in her social media posts, CD booklets, music videos and more. In 2017, she said the 'whole video' for 'Look What You Made Me Do' was an Easter egg, and in 2019, she said she 'trained' her fans to scour her every move for clues. This has caused fans to generate wild theories that aren't true—like a rumor she wrote the big-budget movie 'Argylle' under a pen name, which was false—though in recent years, she has directly challenged fans to unscramble the titles of upcoming songs. Swift is the wealthiest woman in music with a net worth of $1.6 billion, according to Forbes estimates. She joined the billionaire ranks in 2023 as the Eras Tour smashed records to become the highest-grossing tour of all time, at more than $2 billion. How to watch 2025 American Music Awards: Date, performers, nominees, more (USA Today)
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Handmaid's Tale' reflects Margaret Atwood's eerie talent for reading the palm of power
As the inspiration for the television hit The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's writing remains eerily prophetic. Her work has often had its finger on the pulse of power. Her prescience is part imaginative projection and part attention to history and political trends. The sixth and final season of the original Hulu show, which ends this week, has drawn from Atwood's politics even as it departs from her Handmaid's follow-up, The Testaments. Both Atwood's book and the series have reflected currents of political turmoil, in particular rising authoritarianism in the United States as well as the erosion of women's rights south of the border. These real-life trends also raise questions about the debts humans owe to one another, a common Atwood theme. Read more: Atwood has said that: 'In The Handmaid's Tale, nothing happens that the human race has not already done at some time in the past, or which it is not doing now, perhaps in other countries, or for which it has not yet developed the technology.' There's a similar theme at the end of Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth when she re-imagines 'Scrooge Nouveau,' adapted from Charles Dickens' original character. Visited by different spirits as penance for his greed, Scrooge Nouveau is shown a news article from the 1970s. In it, analysts predicted the collapse of the world economy in 2042, alongside 'widespread pestilence, poverty and starvation.' While Atwood's retelling of Dickens's story is fictional, the prediction is real. In Payback, the article Scrooge Nouveau sees references data collected in The Limits of Growth, a 1972 study out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that used predictive modelling to anticipate humankind's future. Scrooge Nouveau is outraged because people knew and did nothing. When he visits an implied 2040s future with a giant cockroach figure of 'the Spirit of Earth Day Future,' he sees two options: a world thriving on a permaculture model of sustainability versus himself with a wheelbarrow of money, starving to death, as he witnesses 'a moment of hyperinflation.' We know. We can see a potential future unfolding before our eyes. When Atwood reads the figurative palm of power to interpret the future, she's reading where the lines of history lead. Her question for us might be: 'What will we do?' Current U.S. rhetoric, paired with challenges to bodily autonomy and rising global warnings about neo-fascism, beg questions about how we understand society's interconnectedness, across eras and across communities, how we can trust each other and how this will inform our sense of responding to what's 'right.' Read more: In the Handmaid's series, wealth is hoarded as trust erodes and bodies are turned into objects and things. In her 1973 essay 'Notes on Power Politics,' Atwood wrote that 'from the point of power that is what we are: things, objects, the manipulated.' Survival in this ideological framework depends on how and with whom one co-operates. Atwood calls survival, or 'la Survivance,' a 'multi-faceted and adaptable idea.' It means 'carving out a place and a way of keeping alive' and surviving in the face of disaster or crisis. Survival is communal because of the ways we become indebted to and rely on others for how we stay alive. As the Handmaid's show ends, a new spotlight is shining on the theme of resistance against the backdrop of protagonist June's perpetual, seemingly hopeless re-entry into Gilead, the theocratic dictatorship established when a military coup overthrew the U.S. government. The debt she feels towards her kidnapped young daughter, Hannah, motivates the story's narrative arc of redemption and survival in the face of insurmountable odds. This links back to how the crux of both the series and Atwood's novel hinge on power — who has it, who gets it, how one takes it and at what cost. While the commanders feel that power is their due, other debts in terms of rights and freedoms bring their society to a breaking point. The ongoing conversation about trust — who can you trust, when, in what circumstances, and how much that trust is worth — continues to challenge how democracy relies on faith or confidence for certain political systems to work. What might be missing in Gilead is the promise of reciprocation or a relational binding as part of a community. Instead, The Handmaid's Tale series builds reciprocation, as a form of indebtedness, into the relationships the handmaids have with each other and their wider connections with friends and family. They embody Atwood's axioms on debt, survival and resistance: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, the novel's and series' theme of 'Don't let the bastards grind you down.' The resistance survives because the spirit of indebtedness outweighs the belief in money and power; in other words, a faith in objects creates no feelings of reciprocity. If the foreshadowing in this seasons's episodes 'Exodus' and 'Execution' tell viewers anything, it's that fighting for beliefs based on trust, 'paying back' and 'paying forward,' will always lead to what's right in the end. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organisation bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Sharon Engbrecht, University of British Columbia Read more: Hulu's 'The Handmaid's Tale' casts Canada as a racial utopia MAGA's 'war on empathy' might not be original, but it is dangerous Christian nationalism in the U.S. is eerily reminiscent of 'dominionist' reformers in history Sharon Engbrecht does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
