LOS ANGELES--As a producer, director and the lead actor for the Emmy-winning Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Elisabeth Moss isn’t ready to say goodbye to the dystopian drama series after a six-season long run.
“There's been a very few periods of my life in the last nine years that I have not been working on this show,” Moss said.
“It hasn't hit me at all yet that I'm not playing her (June Osborne) anymore,” she added.
The series, created by Bruce Miller and based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, will debut its sixth and final season on Hulu on Tuesday. The show follows the totalitarian religious extremist government of Gilead that is driven by power-hungry men who brutally subjugate women in the aftermath of collapsing fertility rates and war.
Some women, called handmaids, are treated as breeders who must bear children for superior infertile families. Moss plays a woman named June Osborne, who is forced to become a handmaid along with her friend Moira Strand, played by Samira Wiley.
Other cast members include Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia Clements, a woman in charge of overseeing the handmaids and Bradley Whitford as Commander Joseph Lawrence, a repentant leader in Gilead.
Whitford and Moss find it striking how much the show has become a symbol for the real-life global women’s rights movement. “There's a message about resistance, that is basically what I would say, the theme of this final season is,” Whitford said.
“I think we all feel very lucky to be part of something that's getting that message out,” the actor, who also starred in “The West Wing,” added.
Echoing this, Moss reflected on how the final season makes an effort to create a bigger impact and highlights the importance of revolution. “I feel like we feel so proud and so honored that people have taken this show as a symbol of resistance and using that (handmaid) costume as a symbol of resistance and being able to use this show to encourage themselves to fight for what they believe in,” Moss said.
For her, it was vital to push further than ever before for the show’s finale. "It was the biggest season we've ever done, more locations, more cast, more story, more sets, just everything we did was bigger,” the actor said.
