It won’t be long now before we have The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5. The Emmy-winning Hulu drama is currently in production in Toronto with Elisabeth Moss and showrunner Bruce Miller at the helm for what could be its final season.
The cast and crew of the series have shared some details about Season 5, plus exciting casting announcements have recently been made, all building up momentum for what’s bound to be a gripping string of episodes.
Here, we break down everything we know about The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 so far.
The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 Cast
Expect to see your favorite series regulars in The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 cast. Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Max Minghella, Ann Dowd, Samira Wiley, O-T Fagbenle, Alexis Bledel, Bradley Whitford, Madeline Brewer, Amanda Brugel, and Sam Jaeger should all be part of the new season. It’s likely that Joseph Fiennes will reappear as Commander Fred Waterford in flashback form. And though not confirmed, Mckenna Grace will likely appear again as Esther Keyes, who went from Gilead wife to Handmaid in the whirlwind Season 4.
That whirlwind season ended with June and other liberated Handmaids brutally killing Fred in a Gilead-style salvaging. Miller told The Hollywood Reporter after the June 2021 finale that Fred “dying doesn’t mean Joe stops coming and being part of the cast. We do have quite a heavy flashback show.”
Christine Ko is joining The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 cast in an exciting new recurring role. The Dave and Hawaii Five-0 alum will play Lily, a former Martha and Gilead refugee who has become a leader of Canada’s resistance movement. Lily is described as “gritty, resourceful” and “a fierce ally” if she trusts you (via The Hollywood Reporter).
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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 Plot
We already know the next season will pick up where The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 left off. And according to Miller, viewers will get to see Serena Joy Waterford’s reaction to Fred’s death. (In the finale, June mailed Fred’s finger and wedding ring to the still-imprisoned Serena. We saw her opening the package, but nothing more. To say we’re chomping at the bit to see her full reaction is an understatement.)
“I think she does not like to lose and she’s lost to June,” Miller told TV Insider after the explosive finale. “And I think she feels directly like June took something from her, did something to her. That war is escalating between those two women, those two very intelligent women who were in a situation where the amount of venom that Serena threw June’s way was so irredeemably awful that now these two women are kind of circling each other and one is full of rage from that treatment and the other is full of rage/just competitiveness over excising her powerful husband from the world. That’s really interesting because I think that she has a route to personal power off of the reflected power of Fred in an easier way than she’s had in the past.”
While June will be on the warpath to get Hannah out of Gilead, get her revenge on Serena, and topple the oppressive regime, she’ll be struggling internally with her choices in the finale.
“I don’t know if she’s on her way to closure. The point of view I take is always, what does June feel? Not whether I think she’s on the edge of closure, but I think for her, she feels like she’s turned down a bad road and can never turn back,” Miller said. “She feels like she’s made a decision that she is an avenging murderous person, not a mom. Whether or not that sticks, whether or not she is able to get over that decision, I think right now she feels pretty seriously broken and probably unfixable at this stage.”
As for the Aunt everyone loves to hate, Dowd says the scripts she’s seen for Season 5 shocked her in a thrilling way.
“I’ve read the first couple of episodes and all I can say is they’re so good,” she told The Independent. “I just didn’t see any of this stuff coming. To be able to get to Season 5 and you’re thinking, ‘What?!’ Not in an outlandish way where you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute, how could that happen?’ It’s like: ‘[gasps] that is fantastic.’ It’s really good. There’s stuff that happens that’s like, ‘Woah, woah, woah.’”
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That’s what we like to hear. While the specific details of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 are largely under wraps, June has powerful allies in Gilead through Nick and Commander Lawrence, which she and Lily could use to their advantage, should they team up. It’s possible June will try to liberate Janine and Esther from Gilead, in addition to her and Luke’s daughter, Hannah, now living in Colorado.
We’ll hopefully get to see more or Moira and Emily’s humanitarian efforts as well, and we’d love to see Luke get involved in the resistance efforts like he does in The Testaments — Margaret Atwood’s sequel novel to the original Handmaid’s Tale book. Also, here’s hoping there are more appearances from Cherry Jones as June’s mother, Holly! (We wouldn’t hate it if it turned out she was actually alive…)
The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 Release Date
There’s no official release date just yet, but The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 is slated to come out in 2022. Stay tuned with TV Insider for more updates on this front.
Will The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 Be Its Last?
The Handmaid’s Tale could very well conclude with Season 5, but nothing is set in stone.
“We’re having conversations right now about what the future of The Handmaid’s Tale holds,” Jordan Helman, head of scripted content for Hulu Originals, told Variety. “What [executive producers] Bruce [Miller], Warren [Littlefield], and Lizzie [Moss] have delivered for us over the course of the past several years really warrants a tremendous amount of trust both ways. And so I have the deepest belief that they’re going to come to us with a plan about how much longer the show needs to go on.”
Miller told The Hollywood Reporter he “absolutely” has an ending in mind for The Handmaid’s Tale, but time will tell how many more seasons they need to land it.
“I don’t want to stretch it out. But there were things we all wanted to do in season four and we couldn’t get one tenth of them done,” he said. “You don’t want to jump over all this interesting stuff.”
The Testaments is also being developed into a spinoff series at Hulu with Miller at the helm. The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 started laying the groundwork for that series, which will likely feature Aunt Lydia as the main character, like in the book.
Until then, nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
The Handmaid’s Tale, Season 5 Premiere, TBA, Hulu