Everything You Need To Know About The 4th Season Of Hulu’s Drama “The Handmaid’s Tale”
The Handmaid’s Tale is an American series created by Bruce Miller, based on the 1985 novel of the same name. The plot features a dystopia following a Second American Civil War wherein a totalitarian society subjects fertile women, called “Handmaids”, into child-bearing slavery.
The series has gotten positive responses from both critics and fans and according to Wikipedia; It is the first show produced by Hulu to win a major award as well as the first series on a streaming service to win an Emmy for Outstanding Series. In July 2019, the series was renewed for a fourth season, which is scheduled to premiere in 2021.
Here’s everything we know about the 4th installment.
New Cast Details
Deadline reports that Mckenna Grace has joined the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 in a curious new role. Grace will take on the recurring part of Mrs. Keyes. Yes, you read that right — Mrs. — as in married. The 14-year-old actress’ character is the (horrifyingly) teenage wife of a “much older Commander.” She is described as confidently running her farm and household.
Mrs. Keyes is said to be even-tempered and devout on the outside while possessing a “rebellious” streak leaning toward the “subversive.” On the inside, she is rife with turmoil and even “insanity.” You might remember Mckenna Grace from The Haunting Of Hill House, where she played the younger version of Kate Siegel’s Theodora “Theo” Crain.
Season 4 will see series star Elisabeth Moss step behind the camera for an episode. Episode 3 of the new season will mark her directorial debut, and Moss hilariously joked that her only hurdle for this job will be working with the “incredibly demanding” lead actress.
Release Date And Plot Details
Just like all the other movies and Tv show productions, the Handmaids Tale was a couple of weeks into filming its fourth season when the fast-growing coronavirus outbreak shut down production in mid-March.
According to showrunner Bruce Miller, it’ll be worth the wait. “Don’t try to guess what happens,” he told earlier this year. “That’s a fool’s errand. You will not be able to know what happens. That’s the beauty of the show.”
Warren Littlefield told TV Guide that Season 4 was supposed to drop in the Fall of 2020 but COVID-19 has thrown that plan out of the window and will now premiere in 2021 and has resumed production in Toronto two weeks ago, sources said.
“We were two weeks into shooting when we shut down, so we didn’t get a lot in the can,” Elisabeth Moss previously told Deadline. “Our writers are still writing, and they’re continuing to write the season obviously remotely from their own homes separately, and that train is still chugging along.”
She continued, “Yeah [first time directing]. I know…. You prep and spend so much time thinking about it and you’re ready to go, and you’re excited, and you feel like, ‘OK I’m ready’, and then when this happens you sort of have this funny thing where you’re like, ‘Well I guess I have more time to think about it’.”
“We were only two weeks in, so we actually have an entire season to shoot. We want to go back to work because families have people to support and rent they need to pay, but at the same time, no human’s life is worth a TV show,” Moss told back in May. “We’re just trying to figure out how to do it safely for everybody.”
Hulu did release a little teaser trailer for the 4th season back in June
“It’s definitely kind of hitting them,” Miller told TV Guide. “It’s their reason for their existence — reproduction. So when you start taking away those children, I think it’s going to make Gilead very angry.”
Executive producer Warren Littlefield told reporters at the Television Critics Association winter press tour that they are not writing Season 4 as if its the final season. In fact, there’s plenty of story left to tell. “We have not planned Season 4 to be the end, but we also look to Margaret [Atwood]’s book The Testaments and know that that story takes us 15 years into the future,” Littlefield said. “We don’t see ending it in [Season 4], and I can honestly say to you, we don’t have a definitive out. But I think we want to keep the bar high, and it would not be a bad thing to leave the audience wanting more, and then we could ideally shift into The Testaments.”
In an interview with Collider, series star, producer, and upcoming director, Elisabeth Moss revealed that The Handmaid’s Tale’s cast and crew tried to work on Season 4 during quarantine. “We have a production call, every week, and we have a producer call every week,” Moss said. “There have been a lot of emails, a lot of Zooms, and a lot of conversations. One of the great things that our line producer has done is basically gone to every single department and talked to them, and picked their brain and tried to figure out what their daily process is, and what they’re looking for and what they need in order to feel safe, which I think is a really important part of it.”
“You don’t want to be setting up season 4 in season 3. Audiences smell that coming,” showrunner Bruce Miller told Entertainment Weekly. “So, what I do is completely screw myself at the end of the season. Then you think, ‘Oh, there’s a whole bunch of smart writers who will come in next season and solve that problem.’”
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Miller said: “It’ll always stay June’s story. The show is all from June’s point of view — all of it, including scenes with other people.
“Those are scenes where either she knows those people well enough to piece together what would have happened, or at some point afterwards, someone who was there told her what happened. Every single thing we see is something she either knows or would know, because she’s telling us this story.”
He added: “My intention is that the show will always be in June’s point of view. Part of what makes the show so scary is that limited perspective.”
During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Miller spoke about the direction the show could take. “I see a world beyond [the current one]. I would watch an episode about the Nuremberg trials after Gilead falls. There are lots of worlds you think of… where everything has changed so much.”
But he went on to say that he still wants the drama to remain faithful to the original source material. “My arc is still very much the arc of the novel, which is the arc of this one woman’s experience in Gilead at this time and her recollections that paint this picture of what it was like and what the experience of this world was like, which really is still the book,” he said.
Moss has teased that the show would be changed slightly from its pre-pandemic version, before telling The Hollywood Reporter: “I have notes in my book about human contact and human touch, isolation versus community… all these themes are really already present in season four.”
Hulu CEO Randy Freer told Variety about his company’s successful original drama and his plans for more seasons:
“The creative process will determine, is it a fourth season, is it five seasons? And I think that’s one of the benefits for creators in the streaming world — shows can take a natural progression, they can live for as long as they should live or they can end. I think it’s unfair sometimes in the characterization of broadcast television that we talk about a show’s been canceled after four years or seven years, whatever it is … Look, I hope, as success goes, there’s 10 seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Are you waiting impatiently to soak up the next season of The Handmaid’s Tale? Let us know in the comments below
Originally published at site:theweeklydiversion.com on September 19, 2020.
