Ann Dowd, Elisabeth Moss, Samira Wiley and Madeline Brewer Relive Their ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Full-Circle Face Off

[This story contains spoilers from season six, episode eight of The Handmaid’s Tale, “Exodus.”]

The Handmaid’s Tale resistance finally arrived and it took everyone by surprise, but none more than Aunt Lydia.

The eighth episode of the sixth and final season of the Hulu series circled all the way back to the very beginning. After setting up the biggest coup ever planned by June (Elisabeth Moss) and her fellow handmaids at the end of last episode, this week’s hour, titled “Exodus,” opened with a callback where June in voiceover explains the logic behind the creation of Gilead’s class system and why the totalitarian regime cloaked its handmaids in red.

“They assigned us colors. They dictated what we wore. Who we could be. They used our clothes to divide us, to dehumanize us,” she explains. “They put us in red, the color of blood, to mark us.”

But, she says, “They forgot that it’s also the color of rage. Tonight those robes will be our weapons. We will use these robes to start a war.”

Those red-cloaked handmaids, armed with knives in their sleeves and the knowledge that they spiked Serena Joy’s (Yvonne Strahovski) wedding cake, then became a stealth army when they attended the opulent Gileadean nuptials between the former Mrs. Waterford and her new High Commander beau, Wharton (Josh Charles). With June hiding among them, they pulled off their plan, which left all the Commanders in attendance drugged to sleep so the handmaids could kill some of their captors.

The only person who caught wind of their movement was Aunt Lydia, and it brought about another satisfying final-season reunion when she faced off with her former girls: June, Moira (Samira Wiley) and her most special former handmaid, Janine (Madeline Brewer).

“Where is June Osborne?! should be the name of the episode,” Ann Dowd tells The Hollywood Reporter of the line Lydia screams after she’s realized that June is hiding among her rebellious handmaids. “Filming that whole storyline — from seeing the cake underneath that they didn’t finish and the way they shot that to Lydia thinking she sees June [at the wedding] — it was all wonderful.”

But this time, when the familiar group then comes face-to-face inside the recognizable Red Center, home to the handmaids training school and familiar season-one stomping ground for the series, there was no violence. Instead, June used her words to bring about a lightbulb moment for dear Lydia, which will set Dowd’s character up for her forthcoming journey in The Testaments sequel series.

“My first approach was that June was really mean to Lydia,” co-showrunner Yahlin Chang tells THR of writing the scene. “June broke Lydia down and called her a pathetic, old lady. It was mean! And actually, both the director Daina Reed and Lizzie [Moss] were like… ‘Would she be so mean? (Laughs) Is that the best way to convince Lydia?’ I looked at it again and thought, no, she would appeal to her better angels. So I rewrote the scene about the immaculate soul that God has given to us and I think that ended up working out better.”

After Lydia suspects that June was behind the wedding attack, June reveals herself at the Red Center to calmly run through the litany of offenses Lydia has been guilty of against them throughout the series. But then she appeals to her. “I think you’ve seen things you can’t unsee and I think that you’ve learned things that you can’t unlearn,” June tells Lydia. “I know that in your heart of hearts, you know that rape is rape. And you know it wasn’t our fault, and we don’t deserve this. We’re not fallen women. We’re rising up because in each and every one of us is this immaculate soul that was given to us by God that’s just crying out for dignity and freedom.”

After some protest, Lydia sees the light. June asks Lydia to stand up for her girls and finally declare: Enough. Seeing Janine emerge to then tell her how hurt she has been by the men of Gilead pierces Lydia’s subjective blindness. She decides to acquiesce, apologizes as Janine embraces her and, in a miraculous moment, Lydia lets all the girls go.

“I didn’t want to play it in an angry way or even in an overly emotional way,” Moss tells THR. “June knows that her power lies in reasoning with Lydia, and appealing to her love for these girls. June has managed to harness her rage and use it when she needs to, like when she’s perhaps doing away with people that shouldn’t be there anymore. But she’s also able to control it when she needs to, like a truly good leader.”

June, meanwhile, stabbed Timothy Simons’ Bell to death in the eye, a fitting death for the commander who had been abusing Janine at Jezebel’s and then as his handmaid. “Poetic justice,” Brewer tells THR of Bell’s fate. “I believe in poetic justice.”

Reasoning with Lydia is what was needed in the moment, adds Moss, who will direct the next and final two episodes of the sixth and final season. “I wanted to make sure that I kept myself very calm in that scene. June knows that if she approaches Lydia with too much rage or passion, Lydia’s not going to respond to that. She needs to approach her with, ‘I see who you are and I respect you, Lydia.’ And I think it’s sincere. It’s not just a tactic. She knows that she can appeal to Lydia’s love for these girls. And she knows that Lydia must have seen what’s been going on in the past few encounters with these girls.”

Absent of physical violence, Moss says the scene felt true to The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood’s words: “A word after a word after a word is power,” quotes Moss, “and that’s what she uses with Lydia.”

Dowd didn’t know of Chang’s original idea, and says the turn of scene was wise, given Lydia’s combative state of mind. “She could snap easily and she’s accustomed to that behavior, and the fact that June Osborne was calm and articulate to tell her, ‘No, that was you, Lydia. This is what you have done,’” says Dowd, “Lydia can’t push it away. It’s landing, and you have to hear it. Samira going after her is one thing, but June, that was really well planned, because what could Lydia say? What June is saying is true, and there’s no way out. What June is suggesting should happen. It allowed the story to play out as it did.”

Production designer Elisabeth Williams said they had many discussions about how to piece the Red Center face off together, which was shot in a new location. “We’ve actually shot the Red Center in five different locations. We’ve been piecing that location together since the beginning, for various reasons,” she tells THR. “We assume or imagine it to be either an old convent or an old school, but nobody can actually picture it because no one has ever seen the exterior. We’ve seen the handmaids sleep in different quarters that all kind of look the same; school-like, church-like. So we felt we could get away with having a whole new location. And when I watched the show, it works.”

Costume designer Leslie Kavanaugh and her team were tasked with recreating the red robes for the opening scene. “We recreated the original color, which Ane Crabtree did for season one — there was a lot of testing done, it was a whole process,” she tells THR of that sequence. “They’re putting fabrics into these massive dye baths, so it was a little bit of science and trial and error to find the right red. We worked on that for about a month trying different fabrics.”

Brewer admits two people were missing for her when being back in that Red Center. “It was strange to be back there and in the red robes with all of us together without Nina and Bahia,” she says of Kiri’s Alma and Watson’s Brianna, who were fatally hit by a train in season three.

But the Lydia moment was so earned. “This is a confrontation that’s been brewing for a really long time,” Brewer tells THR. “It was so satisfying to be able to do it and to force Lydia to confront that she’s not been a protector, that she’s been complicit in this pain and in this torturous, horrible place. It also allowed for a lot of history between the women to be unspoken, for everything they’ve been through together to hang in the air. And then to get those handmaids out. These girls who maybe haven’t even been placed in a commander’s home yet. That felt so satisfying. Let’s get us all out of here.”

While Moss and Brewer have returned to their red cloaks throughout the series, Wiley has not been back in her original costume since season one. Putting the robe back on — her original costume designed by Crabtree — spurred emotions for the actor who plays Moira.

“I could not believe that I was going to go to the Red Center and put on that dress again,” Wiley tells THR. “I happened to wear the exact same dress that I wore my first day on set, which was really emotional for me. I remember having those first meetings with Ane about the level of intention she had in creating the shade of red. I have never worked with anyone like her before and it felt like returning to that season one and returning to all of that.”

Moira was actually dressed like an Aunt when she left the Red Center back in season one in her ruse to escape. “So we used the hero costume because that was very important to me,” says Kavanaugh. “I was trying to do a lot of little tie-backs and throwbacks to different seasons to bring it full circle, and I really wanted to pay homage to each designer that’s been here for their hard work.”

Unlike June’s steady hand, Moira gets to drop an F-bomb — twice — which at first shocks Lydia given the rules against profanity in the society. “Being able to say that to Lydia was awesome. Just amazing and full circle being able to do that in that room with those women,” adds Wiley. “It was a little interesting doing it with Ann because she is the exact opposite of Aunt Lydia. In between takes, she’s making sure everybody’s okay! But for Moira, that was an amazing moment. Season six, for me, is really in contention for being the best season.”

For Dowd, Moira standing up to Lydia and telling her off brought back memories from the pilot, when Lydia had Janine’s eye famously removed for using profanity. “When Samira stands up to basically say, ‘Fuck off,’ that takes me back to the very beginning when Maddie, as Janine, uses the word, ‘Fuck’ twice,” says Dowd. “Lydia just about loses her mind. It’s like, ‘Who has the gall?’ There’s a bit of that here, but Lydia’s scared this time.”

Chang and co-showrunner Eric Tuchman joked that they wrestled over who got to write the pivotal Lydia episode. “We’ve been building up over the seasons to this moment where Lydia gets the truth shoved in her face,” says Chang. The episode ends with Lydia praying for forgiveness. “All I knew was that Lydia was going to let the handmaids go, but how was she going to do it and how were we going to get her there? What were June and Janine going to say to her to get her to do that?”

In the middle of the night, the words flowed to Chang. “I started doing this monologue in my head and it came to me that you can’t unsee what you’ve seen, you can’t unlearn what you’ve learned.”

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The Handmaid’s Tale releases new episodes of season six Tuesdays on Hulu. Follow along with THR’s final season interviews.