It’s been another dramatic ride this season on the Emmy-winning “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Series creator Bruce Miller and his writing staff have forged their own path after the first season mostly followed Margret Atwood‘s classic novel and, in so doing, have found inspiration from the darkest timeline many Americans are now experiencing. The events depicted often seem too close to home, but there have been rays of hope here and there that make you believe that June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) and the other Handmaids may escape the nightmare of the former mainland United States, now an extreme authoritarian regime known as Gilead.
This week’s episode was co-written by Kira Snyder, a supervising producer on the show who was also one of four credited writers on “Pacific Rim: Uprising.” Snyder is currently working on the third season of Handmaid’s but took some time to chat about the dramatic events of the latest installment, June’s journey over the course of the season, how the show has intentionally worked in more pop culture references and just how they got none other than Oprah Winfrey to provide an uplifting vocal cameo this week.
Warning: If you have not watched the latest episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Holly,” there are major spoilers ahead.
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The Playlist: We have to start with the unexpected cameo everyone is talking about. Where did the idea of having Oprah do the voice over for Radio Free America come from?
Kira Snyder: Well, we did not know at the time I was writing the script that it would be Oprah, but she’s someone that we loved, and she’s a fan of the show, so my understanding is that it was the idea of someone in our production office named Tori Larsen, and she brought the idea to the Executive Producers and they loved it. They got around the idea, and we were thrilled that Oprah said “yes.”
I think one of the things that’s so interesting about the choice is that in the context of such a dark, dystopian world it’s elicits such a huge amount of hope for viewers. How intentional was that? Is that a topic the writing staff focus on? That “Hey, maybe we need to shine a little light so that people will continue to watch the show?”
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a reminder that there’s a lot to fight for, and so to hear that voice in that moment, again, with the music it [works] in that moment to motivate [June] to take this perhaps very dangerous and uncertain next journey with her child, so yeah. We wanted to inspire her, to give her the strength to do what happens later in the episode, but also to remind the viewers that hope is not resilient. It’s at the core of the story that we’re telling and it’s important to hang on to that.
I don’t mean to harp on this subject, but I’ve been really struck by friends who loved the first season now saying they don’t know how much longer they can watch it. It’s too hard with everything going on with the real world. Is that something the production is aware of?
Yeah, of course. I mean, we live in the world like everybody else. We are, as a staff, very aware of current events. We feel them very intensely. We’re all news and politics junkies, so current events absolutely come into the writer’s room. We bring that with us. We bring it home with us. The thing that’s eerie for us is that we wrote down these episodes last year. I mean, these episodes were written almost a year ago in some cases, so we of course have no crystal ball for knowing that they would be coming out in this particular timeframe. Part of it is that I think the frame of the world has gotten darker, so the show probably feels darker in comparison, but the fact is, we are depicting a brutal totalitarian theocracy, and they behave the way they behave. That being said, we try to be very mindful about how and what we depict. We stay very truthful to Margaret Atwood’s [mantra] when she was writing the novel, which is “everything in there is based on something that has happened or is happening in real life.” We don’t like to live in those moments, but we feel like there is a truth to the story that we’re telling. By the same token, we understand that it’s a hard story and certainly the time in which we’re living, it’s maybe a lot for people to try to digest right now. There’s a whole way people kind of have palate cleansers. They watch an episode of “The Mindy Project” or something like that afterwards, but we watch the show, of course, as well as writing on it. It can be hard to be in those darker moments, but that makes those moments of true hope and resistance, and I firmly believe that resilience is resistance, all the more important. Yeah. We hear what people are saying. We feel, ourselves, what people are feeling. We are striking the balance between telling the truth of the story and making sure that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel, because the human spirit, specifically embodied in June, is indomitable and the fight goes on. That’s what we’re interested in depicting.
What was the thought process behind having June give birth to her baby completely by herself in this episode?
The story of June giving birth has been, I believe, in Bruce Miller’s mind basically since the beginning of the show. As we were working on season one, and it was going to end with June being pregnant, the obvious implication is at some point she’s going to give birth [the next season]. So, I know he’s been thinking up the story for a long time and having conversations with Elisabeth Moss, and June being alone when this happened, I believe, has been core to that story since the very beginning when he started thinking about it and we started working on it. To you earlier question, it is a moment of so much triumph and victory. She’s been through so much and for her to go through this ordeal and come out of it kind of reborn herself, reforged into something newer and stronger and this is something we’ll see going forward is that the June that we see in episodes to come, she’s different from the June in the series up to this point. We talked about in the room of this episode being an episode of two births, Polly being born, of course, but a new version of June, and she is this kind of amazing primal warrior woman, so having that moment where she is literally alone, but and this is also important, we wanted her to be metaphorically surrounded by memories of her family, of Hannah being born, of Moira, of Luke, of her own mother, Polly, her daughter’s namesake. Even being in that weird birth ceremony with Janine [Madeline Brewer] from season one and learning how to give birth the Gilead style. All of that seasoned who she is now, so she has all of that to arm her for what she has to do. She is alone and not alone at the same time.