‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Star Madeline Brewer on Her Final Season Predicament

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

Madeline Brewer took a break from the eye patch before filming the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. In another final season for Netflix’s buzzy serial killer drama You, the Orange Is the New Black alum starred as Louise, the final obsession of Penn Badgley‘s Joe Goldberg, who set out to avenge the death of her friend from season one. That fifth season released in full on April 24, as The Handmaid’s Tale sixth and final season has been rolling out weekly on Hulu.

“It was so fun to not have an eye patch, just to get cute little clothes and be a cute girl,” Brewer tells The Hollywood Reporter with a laugh of filming You. That cute girl, meanwhile, ended up finally bringing about justice to streaming television’s most elusive and lusty killer to bring an end to You, and her tenacity in that horror show certainly parallels with the never-ending plight she faces on the final season of her dystopian drama set in the fictional world of Gilead.

Brewer filmed You from March to August of last year before heading into production on The Handmaid’s Tale in September. The Hulu and MGM series wrapped in February, and began its final season release in early April.

“I don’t get recognized all that much for Janine and I do think that that will change a little bit because You is so visible,” she says of her very recognizable character on Handmaid’s, who has been wearing a patch ever since having her eye removed in the pilot, an unforgettable punishment handed down to her by the oppressive Gileadean regime for her use of vulgar language. “But I also look very different on the show. If you see me out in the world with my sweatpants on, my hair up and sunglasses on, you might not see Janine, especially if my hair is straight. But if I go out with my curly hair, people do tend to say something.”

The Handmaid’s Tale viewers first met Janine as a fellow handmaid with Elisabeth Moss‘ starring protagonist June, who was then going by her Gilead-given name, Offred. Under the rule of Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), Janine, who was then known as Ofwarren, and the fellow handmaids introduced viewers to the world set up by Margaret Atwood in her bestselling 1985 novel of the same name, which has now spawned a forthcoming Hulu continuation based on her follow-up novel, The Testaments.

Over the six seasons, Brewer’s Janine has been put through the wringer by the oppressive society. After her run as a handmaid (when women are forced to produce children for the elite ruling families of Gilead) and having her baby taken away, Janine was banished to the world’s wasteland called the Colonies. She finally escaped and reunited with June in Chicago, where she survived a near-fatal bombing, but then she was recaptured and sixth season now finds her in another horror land in Gilead: Jezebel’s, the brothel where women are sent to be sex slaves for Gilead’s High Commanders.

“The only [class system] I haven’t been [in The Handmaid’s Tale] is an Econo person,” Brewer points out of her road to the end. “The Econopeople are people who aren’t high-ranking members of Gilead, but they live in the society. They’re not people who get assigned handmaids. They’re just kind of regular folks.”

While working in Jezebel’s, Janine has caught the eye of High Commander Bell (played by Veep and Nobody Wants This star Timothy Simons). The series has stopped short of showing the constant abuse Janine is put through in Jezebel’s private rooms, but viewers can easily imagine for themselves, given Bell’s expressed proclivities and fascination with Janine.

“Working with Tim is the best. He’s so creative, I guess it’s the comedy background, he wants to try things out, which I love because you don’t really get a ton of time to rehearse,” says Brewer of her new season six scene partner. “You’re shooting a full hour-long episode in eight or nine days. It’s crazy. So he was really down to discuss the characters and discuss their relationship, which was amazing.”

Simons helped put Bell into perspective. “He said something about Commander Bell being like a high school boyfriend, he just wants you to love him. He wants you to like him. He wants you to make him feel big and cool and manly. He does so by trying to get under your skin and being a total prick, but I think that he really brought out the sides of Bell that were like a teenage boy, which makes him just feel so pathetic to me as Janine,” she says. “But Janine once again is a survivor, she plays the part that she needs to play to get through this.”

The irony is that Janine working in Jezebel’s has brought back some of her spark. Not since season four, when Janine escaped Gilead and literally rose from the ashes as a rebel in her post-Gilead life, have The Handmaid’s Tale viewers seen the former handmaid as a leader in her scenario.

“Janine turns it on when I say [to Bell], ‘I’m over here, sugar.’ She tries to turn on the laughter and sexiness, the cute flirtsy stuff, to distract from the fact that the most wanted criminal in Gilead [June] is standing right in front of these Commanders,” she says of episode five, titled “Janine,” which brought about the desired reunion between Janine and her former handmaids when June (Moss) and Moira (Samira Wiley), also a former Jezebel’s girl, infiltrated the brother to do recon for their resistance plan. “Sometimes she’s worn out and hates it and other times, I think she learns how to play the game a bit.”

The Handmaid’s Tale has only touched on the world of Jezebel’s a couple of times, memorably when Moira was sent to the brothel back in season one. “We turned it a bit darker this season. We showed a true kind of brothel atmosphere, which, when you think about it, is that going to disappear in favor of only classy dresses? No, these things exist for a reason,” says Brewer. “And ironically, I think it’s some of the most freedom Janine has had within the walls of Gilead. She’s able to take care of the girls. She can be a little bit mouthier and she has more purpose here. Other girls look to her for what to do and she keeps them in line and she feels like a protector. You can make a life out of that, in Janine’s eyes.”

The plan to kill Commanders and save the girls, however, was aborted when June and Moira’s undercover mission for the Mayday resistance group led to them killing a Commander. With Jezebel’s on high alert, High Commander Wharton (Josh Charles) sought out his son-in-law, High Commander and lover to June, Nick (Max Minghella), and — in a shocking moment of betrayal — Nick confessed June’s plan to Wharton. As a result, Wharton ordered the execution of all the Jezebel’s women, who were brutally shot dead to open episode seven, “Shattered,” in one of the most devastating scenes of violence shown in the series.

Janine was spared, due to Bell’s relationship with her, but now she’s in an even more precarious location — she’s now the personal handmaid to Bell. When Aunt Lydia checks on her most special girl, even the Aunt in charge of the handmaids can’t get access to Janine. Lydia and viewers see a visibly hurt Janine peering through an upstairs window, now locked up as a sex slave for Bell.

But heading into the final three episodes ever of the series, Brewer wants to remind viewers that Janine is a survivor. Earlier in the season, it was Lydia who broke Janine’s poise. It seemed that Janine had accepted her fate as a Jezebel’s girl, but when Lydia gave her a picture drawn by her daughter, Charlotte, who is living with the Lawrence family (Bradley Whitford and Ever Carradine) under the name Angela, Janine found her fire once again. In a fit of rage after Lydia’s visit, she trashed everything in her dressing room, except the picture that she has been since holding onto.

“Janine has been holding on to that poise for a couple seasons now,” says Brewer. “She’s always trying to hold on to some semblance of normalcy or purpose in this world. Janine and Lydia have this kind of mother-daughter relationship. They see through each other’s stuff a bit more. I think that’s why Lydia can really cut to the core of Janine’s rage.”

Holding onto the drawing from her daughter, Brewer says, “is the sign of a survivor.” The devastating yet moving season four flashback that showed Janine’s first child, Caleb, filled viewers in on more of Janine’s backstory and what she has been through. (Caleb died in a car accident after he and Janine were separated in Gilead, and viewers had never seen Caleb until then.)

“You can only have gone through the deepest dark and come out the other side to have that kind of hopeful view on things,” she says. “If you’ve never experienced anything difficult or any adversity or grief, your first experience with something like that can feel like the world is falling apart and it’s harder to get through. Janine has been through so much already. She knows that the only way out is through and, why not try to hope for something better? There’s no hurt in hoping.”

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