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SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Exodus,” Season 6, Episode 8 of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” now streaming on Hulu.
Perhaps no character has symbolized the evolution — and the tricky moral complexity — of “The Handmaid’s Tale” better than Yvonne Strahovski’s Serena Joy Waterford.
When the series premiered in 2017, Serena was the archconservative captor of Handmaid June (Elisabeth Moss), known in the Waterford house as Offred. Since that time, they became unlikely off-on allies in a broader fight, and Serena has been forced to scramble after the killing of her powerful husband (Joseph Fiennes). Now, over the course of the sixth and final season, Serena has taken up residence in the settlement of New Bethlehem, attempting to find a middle way between liberal society and the brutality of the nation of Gilead; she also accepted a proposal of marriage from Commander Wharton (Josh Charles), whom she believed to be more liberal and accepting than other men of his sort.
Courtesy of Hulu
In Episode 8, “Exodus,” Serena wed Commander Wharton in a joyous ceremony that promptly turned sour (and not merely because the Handmaids in attendance were plotting against Gilead one more time); her discovery that he expected to take a Handmaid into their home catapulted her back into a political system she had thought she’d been able to escape. This sort of magical thinking is nothing new for Serena, a fundamentally self-interested figure whose fecklessness has long frustrated series protagonist June. And yet Serena’s unexpected traits — her willful blindness to her own complicity in Gilead, her flashes of strange kindness, her affection and admiration for her former Handmaid — have made her journey a fascinating counterpoint to June’s, and have made Strahovski a signature star of the streaming era.
Strahovski gave Serena her humanity — and the performer still feels for her character, welling up with tears describing the fight for Serena to be something more than a monster. She spoke to Variety about Serena’s wedding and its aftermath, about pushing for Serena to be seen in a different light, and about what the run of the series has meant to her.
Serena evolved quite a bit from where she was when we first met her. Did you see glimmers of the future Serena in the Season 1 scripts?
I didn’t anticipate any of it. I remember starting the show and thinking “Serena is a bit of a mystery.” I had to decide for myself where she was emotionally — that was the only way in, without any judgment. The decision I made was to treat her as a person who had felt betrayed and was deeply wounded by her husband having been involved with a previous Handmaid, before June came along. I’ve always played her from that angle.
Serena’s realization that her new husband wants to bring a Handmaid into their home hits like a ton of bricks. What was it like to play?
Yeah — the rage. Starting with this emotional betrayal from her [first] husband — here we are again with someone she is genuinely having a love connection with, but he’s bringing in a Handmaid. She’s just floored. It’s an immediate rage and betrayal, and she realizes in an instant that June was right.
I was impressed that she broke with him in that moment, after spending so much of the series with Commander Waterford, her first husband.
In the moment, you’d say anything in your anger; whether you stick with that is another story. Serena has always been the kind of person that will choose the best avenue for her survival and her protection. Most characters in Gilead operate this way. It’s self-serving, unlike June, who operates for the greater good. Serena makes self-serving choices. That’s part of why she’s a complex character, is because she struggles to understand what is for the greater good and what is self-serving — and ultimately, she always does self-serving.
I found Serena’s attempt to work with the community of New Bethlehem — evading Gileadean repression — painfully naive. Did you think Serena was misunderstanding the world in which she was operating?
Yes, I do. I think she really consciously leaned into it — she knew it was a delusion, but the reason she did it was that she had to. It was a survival thing. No one is going to give her a passport. She’s got nowhere to go. The way for her to have the most power possible is to take the position that she is being offered in New Bethlehem, and really lean into that, dig her heels in, and become, in her mind, the queen of New Bethlehem.
I find it very poignant when characters in TV struggle to see themselves clearly, and there was a pretty perfect example of that when Serena is speaking to the Handmaids at her wedding, reminiscing to them with this quasi-fictional story about how June and she developed a friendship. She just can’t get out of her own way!
She’s tone deaf. She can’t read the room. And that part of it is tied into this desperate need to have June’s acceptance and forgiveness — a validation that she is, in fact, a good person. She just wants June to say “I do think you’re a good person.” She tries so hard, but she can’t get that, and she can never move past it.
What was the mood like filming this final season?
I was overwhelmed. Most of us were overwhelmed with the fact that people had made so many strong connections and friendships over the nine years that we’ve spent. I was struggling not to feel devastated — I did think that I was going to feel a lot more celebratory. I thought that I would be OK to let it go, but it was overshadowed by the fact that I really, actually loved Serena. I don’t think I realized that I really do love her, because I’m the person who understands her the most.
You’re the expert on her.
It’s a strange position to be in when you’re playing someone who’s awful, but you really do understand her. You feel strange and horrible saying “I understand her,” so you have to shit on her at the same time, so you don’t sound like a total psychopath.
Was it strange to be a woman in the cast, but to be an opposing force to the story of female liberation that viewers were rooting on? It strikes me as a funny position to occupy.
You touch on something that’s been a thing for me. It’s like any job — you start, and you meet all these new people, and you’re straight into working together. But you’re not just being yourself at the office, because you’re pretending to be somebody else. As Serena Joy, you’re kind of working triple overtime outside of your scenes to let everybody know “I’m not that person!”
“I promise! I’m nice!”
You’ve really touched on something that was at the forefront of my mind in the first few seasons. I wondered a lot of the time what they thought of me personally.
Were there times you pushed — or just hoped — for Serena to be softened somewhat in the writing?
Yes, desperately. My personal, desperate need to have her be more likable — I’ve fought so hard to have the audience empathize with her. It’s a very conscious, 1000% fight against what’s on the page, to still somehow garner some kind of sympathy or empathy from the audience, to get them also to be on Serena’s side even during the most heinous moments. It’s easy for her to be horrible and villainous, for everyone to just hate her. But I desperately wanted her to be a better human. I tried to infuse it in every place I possibly could — to make her more of a human.
Having her be a one-dimensional villain would perhaps have been too easy. She’s certainly more complicated than that!
There were definitely moments where Bruce [Miller, the series creator] and I used to sit down and I’d be like “I don’t know how to justify this.” There was one time we went back and forth for a week, massaging the whole dynamic of Serena’s internal decision-making process. I don’t know if Bruce did, but I really enjoyed our chats back and forth.
What has the show meant to you?
It’s a big sweep of time. With this semi-recent revelation that I actually do love Serena, I’m still figuring it out. Over the course of the show, I got engaged, got married and had three children. Becoming a parent highlights for you who you are as a person, good and bad and all the things in between. People stuff their gray-area feelings away — all the nuances — but as Serena, I got to highlight them. It was a way to explore my gray areas and things that felt ugly to look at, but I did it anyway. It’s a tough thing to let go of somebody who’s allowed you to do that.
Have you seen the finale?
I haven’t seen anything except the premiere, because I have three children. Every night I go “We’re going to watch my show now” to my husband, and we’re dead.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
English (US) ·