“How do we make this story so that when you get to the end of it, you feel like one of the things that you’ve accomplished is bearing witness to June’s story?”
Photo: Steve Wilkie/Disney
June Osborne has been stuck in the distinctly dystopian story cycle of suffer, escape, repeat for six seasons. In a series finale written by creator Bruce Miller and directed by series star Elisabeth Moss, she takes a walk and contemplates what other possible paradigms there are for living now that Gilead’s borders have shrunk to exclude her hometown. Boston is America again, which means that, technically speaking, June Osborne has returned home.
Miller, though, bristles at the thought of June having completed something so quotidian as the hero’s journey. “It’s way done. Everybody is so ahead of that,” he says. “It worked great when you had plays once a year in Athens.” Over the past ten years, Miller and Moss have logged hundreds of hours of conversation about this one woman, and they mostly talk about her in agreement. Neither could bear to impose the demands of genre on her, for example. Just as for Miller it couldn’t be an epic with a moral at its center, Moss couldn’t see The Handmaid’s Tale as a romance: “That wasn’t June’s story.” We talked for over an hour about the dark, poignant place they ended up instead: June, brave and alone and unable to give up the fight.
Bruce Miller: I’m glad you survived the finale.
The finale was the easiest of it to survive. It’s contemplative, almost meditative, especially in contrast to the streaming trend of supersize mega-finales.
B.M.: Thank God, because all these things, Amanda, are things Lizzie and I specifically talked about wanting it to be. We don’t want to beat people up for getting to the end. That’s not nice. I haven’t been back to watch the early seasons in so long. There was a time where I remembered every cut.
I’m not a rewatcher.
B.M.: I rewatch movies and I reread books. I don’t trust myself the first time through.
Your fans are very attentive, though.
Elisabeth Moss: We make our show for the smartest viewers. We don’t dumb it down. The amount of detail, the amount of thought we put into it, it’s for those viewers.
B.M.: I may not be a rewatcher, either, but our people are rewatchers. I hope they get something new the 100th time. Lizzie’s performance is part of that, but also everything surrounding Lizzie’s performance you hope is done as well and as deeply.
How seriously did you consider killing off June?
B.M.: I didn’t consider it at all.
E.M.: I hear about most of the ideas, even if Bruce decides not to do them. Because he knows that he could tell me and I would think about it. In fact, even now I’m thinking it through. Would that have been interesting? You obviously couldn’t do that given the ending that we have.
Let’s talk about that coda. How quickly did you fix on that for your final scene?
B.M.: Lizzie, I think we talked about that before you booked the show. Wasn’t that our first conversation?
E.M.: That’s very, very possible. That scene has been in my world of June and world of Handmaid’s for so long that I don’t know.
June doesn’t die, but she doesn’t find peace either. She’s headed back into the abyss and that cycle of suffering and escape and return that’s moved and frustrated viewers across the years.
E.M.: I kind of disagree with the way that you just summed up the end for June, because for me, she’s such a different person than she was at other times when she’s gone back into battle. She reaches this place where she’s able to harness her anger to use when she needs it. When she kills Tim Simons’s character, she harnesses that rage specifically to commit that act. But it’s not a rage that she carries around with her. At the end of the finale, she’s able to go, “This is what my purpose is in life: To establish a future for the next generation. Part of that path is going to be telling my story.”
B.M.: June ends up with a big toolbox. She’s learned all these things about herself, but suddenly she isn’t at the mercy of her tools; she’s in control of them.
Her good-bye with Serena could be interpreted through this lens. Forgiveness isn’t a tool June could previously wield.
E.M.: I think the most important thing about that moment is it’s not about Serena. It’s about Noah. June has to give Noah that gift, because he needs to be raised by a mother who isn’t in search of forgiveness for all of her sins. It’s irrelevant whether or not June actually forgives her. It doesn’t matter.
Serena ends the series as a stateless refugee, but some viewers will want to see her indicted as a war criminal.
B.M.: Or in a pine box.
Or that, for sure. Who gets to be redeemed?
B.M.: I don’t believe in redemption. It’s a conceit of a story that has an ending, and we don’t live in that world. When someone says, “You’re redeemed,” what do you do the next day? Serena’s done unforgivable things. I don’t think there’s any forgiving her as a human being. But can June forgive her? Redemption just doesn’t seem like something that exists in the world. It’s a nice idea in a fictional story, but if our story is going to help the audience navigate the world, it can’t be that picture.
E.M.: I think Serena — besides June, who I’m partial to — has my favorite ending. I can’t even think about it without getting emotional. It would happen when I was reading it, and obviously when we shot it, and every time I watched it in the edit. She tells her son, “You’re all I ever needed.” It’s such an incredibly beautiful concept for that character. She’s stripped of all of these things that she thought she wanted, this pursuit of power that so many of the characters, especially the men, are dogged by. I think it’s a happy ending for her.
“The most important thing about that moment is it’s not about Serena,” says Moss. “It’s about Noah. June has to give Noah that gift.”
Photo: Steve Wilkie/Disney
B.M.: And Yvonne, it’s her very last scene, and she brings something new. How does that happen?
E.M.: She had this idea where she was going to come to this place of peace facially and in her performance. Because obviously there were a lot of tears, but she wanted to come to this place of stillness at the very, very end. It was interesting in the edit because there was a clear moment to cut it ten or 15 seconds earlier, and it would be a little tighter and blah, blah, blah. But I remember we looked at it and we were like, We can’t take that away from Serena. It’s so important that she gets to this moment of calm.
Luke and June also share this unhurried break-up that sounds like what a hard conversation actually sounds like. Was there debate about them ending up together?
B.M.: Not debate, but years of thought, and months and months of talking in the off-season.
E.M.: You knew how I felt about it. It was very important to me that June didn’t end up with either man. I felt like that was not our story, and that wasn’t June’s story, and maybe one day down the line, there’s a new beginning for Luke and June. In my heart of hearts, I think that they continue. They have a child together — two children together, really, because he raised Nichole.
People have been asking me for years, “Nick or Luke, Nick or Luke?” I’m the biggest fan of romance and rom-coms, and believe me, I love that shit. But just in this particular story, I felt it was really important that it wasn’t about the boys.
Bruce, tell me about the decision to bring Emily back.
B.M.: I made it as soon as Emily left. Alexis (Bledel) was spectacular on the show. The world got complicated, and she couldn’t stay anymore. I always wanted to bring her back. Lizzie said “yes” so fast I can’t imagine that she wasn’t thinking about it, too. They were really the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale — the two of them learning how to walk in those costumes down the street, learning how to talk to each other with the cones on, learning how to move their bodies so they kind of swish together. And Alexis’s performance was so subtle.
Lizzie, I don’t know if you know, but the first few days I was like, “She’s not doing anything.” You’re watching the monitor and you’re like, “She’s literally not doing anything. We’re paying her for nothing. She memorized lines, thank you very much.” But then you get home and you cut two pieces together, and you’re like, “Oh, dear God.” She had been so big on other things she had been in. She really had a big personality on Gilmore Girls, and here she was so restrained, which is more like her as a person. That was remarkable to me. I remember, Lizzie, you were reassuring that she was actually doing something.
E.M.: My response when you first mentioned bringing Emily back was something along the lines of, “Now that you’ve told me, you do realize that we have to do that, right? Because now I’m not going to be able to let it go.” She was there from basically day zero.
What’s day zero?
E.M.: The first-ever day of filming The Handmaid’s Tale. Bruce said at the top of the final production meeting, “I want everything tonally to feel like the aquarium flashbacks that we shot on day zero of the show.” And I made a mental note. Then we are editing the finale, and it came to us. “We have to go back to the aquarium.” We put those flashbacks in, and I was in a puddle of tears.
It wasn’t scripted that those images of Hannah and June would return?
B.M.: No. By the time Lizzie was directing, I wouldn’t have. Lizzie was directing and Wendy (Hallam Martin) was editing. I’m going to tell them which pieces to choose for a flashback? What am I, an idiot? I let them. If I don’t like something, we can change it.
I’m very proud that we pulled this relationship together, because in the beginning, we really had to figure stuff out. She was very honest about how to communicate with her, and it was work.
How did you want to be communicated with, Lizzie?
E.M.: I don’t think you can communicate too much in what we do. There’s just no version where, in any department, any crew member, any actor, any director can communicate too much. There’s no such thing as too much information. When that starts to lag, it’s the start of so many problems.
How much did the current political moment inform the making of the finale, knowing that it will affect how people interpret it?
E.M.: These writers have never ripped from the headlines. I know that they’ve always had as this guiding light following the truth, and following humanity, whether it’s beautiful or ugly. We have unfortunately wound up in these places where the parallels are striking. I’ve seen it happen. It’s the craziest thing. I’ve seen a script, and then something’s happening in the world politically at the exact same time that episode airs, but we shot it a year ago, and it was written the year before. So when you witness that, you kind of just have to go, “We’re just following the truth.” I guess that has to be what it is.
B.M.: We took on the same real estate that Margaret Atwood took on 40 years ago. If you look at the power dynamics that are playing out at the center of a place like Gilead, you’ll realize they’ve been playing out for thousands of years and they will keep playing out.
E.M.: I remember doing a lot of press with Margaret in the first season, and she talked about the cyclical nature of history. And in 2023, when Bruce and I first started having conversations about this season, the first thing he said to me was, “It’s a circle. It’s all a circle. This season is a circle, and the whole series is a circle.”
What did you mean, Bruce?
B.M.: When you drill down on the book and start to really think about what you’re reading, which is a collection of tapes being played out loud, you realize that the last thing we know about June Osborne, or Offred in the book, is that she recorded these tapes. That’s the last thing we know. Even from the middle of seasons four and five, I started to think about it: How do we make this story so that when you get to the end of it, you feel like one of the things that you’ve accomplished is bearing witness to June’s story?
The final scene links up with the novel in a way that makes it seem like a companion text rather than a straight adaptation. In the novel’s epilogue, Professor Pieixoto is speculating about the alternative identities of the woman who made the recordings. If you fired up the pilot after reading that, it would feel like you were getting the answer to Pieixoto’s questions. And if you watched the series to the end again, you’d end up in the early pages of the novel: “A chair, a table, a lamp.” A circle.
E.M.: In that final scene, the voiceover is the same from episode one. I rememorized it in the same cadence that I spoke it in the pilot.
B.M.: When you watch the first episode, you can hear the tape recorder click before the voiceover starts. That was made when we did the pilot. Lou, our recording engineer, is the happiest recording engineer in the entire universe, because the show is a circle because of that sound.
In the finale, each character that we see actively deciding what to do next makes that decision very consciously as a parent.
B.M.: Every year we have a big meeting for the press people and they want me to talk about the show. And at the beginning of the most recent meeting, I said, “I think this season, like every other season, is about motherhood.” Every season you’re asked, “What’s the theme of this season?” You start to realize if each season has a different theme, I’m really not doing a very good job. They should have the same theme explored from different angles.
Were you tempted to create sort of one last brush between June and Hannah for the finale?
B.M.: Oh, very much so. And, well, at least for me, it felt like she’d seen Hannah so sparingly. I know it seems like a lot, but she has not seen her. Those have been miracles — that she’s been able to see her at all, be able to smell her child again.
E.M.: Every time I thought we had reached the end of the conversation, we decided it felt like we were tying a bow on something that wasn’t ready to be tied up. That isn’t ready to have the bow tied.