As you're gearing up to watch The Handmaid's Tale sequel spinoff The Testaments on Hulu (US) and Disney+ (international) this week — launching on April 8 — something much closer to home might cross your mind.
When season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale first launched in April 2017, Donald Trump had been inaugurated as the USA's 45th President only a few months before.
Almost a decade later, sequel spinoff The Testaments makes its debut 15 months into Trump's second term as the 47th President.
In that time, "The Handmaid's Tale" has been adopted as social shorthand for describing a variety of socio-political developments in the Western world, such as the overturning of the historic Roe vs. Wade legal precedent by the US Supreme Court in 2022.
It almost feels as though nothing has changed between the two TV releases, yet so much has. But does creator Bruce Miller and producer Warren Littlefield feel like they're releasing the sequel spinoff into a different world?
'The world chooses to make us relevant, and Margaret Atwood helps us bring it to life'
"When Margaret [Atwood] first published The Handmaid's Tale in the 1980s, she saw what the world might turn into," Littlefield begins. "And Bruce, brilliantly, was able to adapt that. As we were halfway through making season one of The Handmaid's Tale, number 45 took office."
"Does Trump get an assist in audiences being fascinated with the world that we brought to life? Perhaps. But I think that we always go back to Margaret's view as a worldview. That was also true when The Testaments was published a few years ago — Margaret looked at again how the world was changing, and how Gilead might be still alive... but in a different place, in a different time.
He continues, "Bruce and I have said for many years now, we would like to quietly go away and be irrelevant, but the themes keep pulling us back in. The world chooses to make us relevant, and Margaret helps us bring it to life."
It's a bone-chillingly truthful answer. Perhaps we are as much to blame for why we resonate with Gilead to the extent that we do, and we can't put the complete blame on the door of world politics.
"The world has changed, Margaret saw that," Miller agrees. "That would never happen," he jokes about their work becoming irrelevant, though it feels less humorous in hindsight.
The Testaments is an extension of The Handmaid's Tale in the best way, but it means sitting with yet more uncomfortable ideology and fiction that frequently feels too close to home. Who knows... maybe we'll learn from it this time.
