Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season 3 finale ofThe Handmaid’s Tale, “Mayday.”
“What now?”
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How are you feeling about season 3 now that it’s completed?
Credit: Jasper Savage/Hulu; Inset: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
What does that mean?
I didn’t want to skip over all that.
Well, let’s talk about June’s dark path this season.
Jasper Savage/Hulu
Was this June’s point of no return?
Oh my gosh, yeah.
June is confronted there.
We like to show those kinds of moments, where she’s really making a moral turn.
This is a complicated situation.
What’s her life going to be like after that?
For June, it’s an incredibly pivotal moment.
June has an outsize sense of empathy.
It’s one of her personal defining characteristics.
She likes the fact that she is that way, and we see that in her.
It’s both a burden and a benefit.
Just because you care about her doesn’t mean, in this extremis, you interfere or not.
I can’t stop or all of this has been a waste."
I know people say that and people think about it in movies and TV.
It’s not like it’s just “The ends justify the means.”
It’s “The means are going to wham you forever.”
Yeah: “What now, big dog?”
[Laughs] As an audience member, you’re 100 percent behind it.
But what happens now?
Is she going to have to pay for it?
Is she going to find some other way to survive?
At the beginning, it was, “You’re never going to see your child again.
You’re never going to fall in love.
You’re never going to talk to your husband again.”
All of these things.
Every single one of them she’s done.
She was trying to piss them off.
It feels like, given this very dramatic and successful plot, Gilead can never be quite the same.
Is that a safe assumption?
I think you want to move the story forward.
You want things to change.
In this new age of so much television, that kind of storytelling is a little frustrating.
To that point, it feels like every other episode now, there’s another major character in Canada.
Do you see that as becoming an increasingly large part of the story?
[Pauses] I think that we’ll be following those stories.
They’re directly connected to her.
As long as they’re directly connected to her, their fate matters to her.
Her friends and the people who love her in Gilead matter to her.
They are making efforts, they are getting into contact, they are all living their lives.
Also, what happened to her enemies is of interest to her.
And if it matters to her, it matters to us.
There are so many children going on this very uncertain journey.
How did you see that part of the finale?
It isn’t necessarily that she’s going to stop.
Anytime June talks to a child, to me she’s talking in some ways to her own daughter.
Here, she points a gun at a child; she’s pointing a gun at her own daughter.
And it’s not, for once, a terrible one.
She actually gets out.
Looking ahead to season 4, it’s early days.
But what does that next chapter look like for you, in the broadest sense?
You don’t want to be setting up season 4 in season 3.
Audiences smell that coming.
They’re too savvy now.
They don’t watch a few hours of TV a week, they watch a million.
They would see that coming.
So what I do is completely screw myself at the end of the season.
That’s what you take a stab at do.
You don’t have a go at end with the exit door marked.
I was trying to end without the exit door marked.
That was a black hole.
Here, she’s being taken through the woods.
It’s June’s story.
Where we’re going is where June is going.
We don’t show all those kids get in the plane.
We don’t show them taxiing, worrying about radar.
We see what June sees.
June was the point of view she chose.
As long as we stay to that, we’re seeing Gilead through Margaret’s eyes.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
