Yvonne Strahovski Unpacks Her Gilead Wedding Night Surprise in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

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

When Yvonne Strahovski was preparing to walk down the aisle as Serena Joy for The Handmaid’s Tale‘s final season, she was nervous.

“That’s not how I usually get when on set,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I had to walk down an aisle with everyone staring at me, and I felt like I was going to fall over doing that slow aisle walk. I was genuinely, extremely nervous.”

Nerves seem appropriate given the grand opulence of the Gilead wedding that was created for the former Mrs. Waterford’s second marriage to High Commander Wharton, played by season six newcomer Josh Charles. The ceremony was set in a church for the eighth episode, titled “Exodus” (which released earlier this week), and the elite affair that followed featured more moving parts than perhaps any prior episode in the Emmy-winning Hulu series. Everyone was invited, from Commanders and their Wives to Aunts and Marthas — even the red-cloaked handmaids.

“Sometimes I wish there was a before-and-after book on the location before we get there and after,” says production designer Elisabeth Williams. “The church itself was absolutely beautiful and architecturally stands on its own. But people would be blown away to see after the wedding what we walked into and what we were able to accomplish.”

Serena’s ceremony gown was a pale icy blue and on the train of the dress, costume designer Leslie Kavanagh and her team hand-cut and stitched leaves in series of three to represent her, baby Noah, Commander Wharton and the new family tree they plan to grow. “She’s going into this marriage on her own terms so I wanted her to go back into blue because she’s choosing to be a wife. This is the first time we saw the blue back on her,” says Kavanagh of the color for the Wives in the show’s tribal society.

“This is Serena’s moment to solidify herself in a power position again and have all public eyes on her,” adds Strahovski of Gilead’s version of a royal wedding. “It’s a protection mechanism when you’re a power figure in the public eye, which I think is exactly what she’s angling for and exactly how she feels safe, especially now that she has a baby to protect. She has no other option, as far as she’s concerned.”

But what Serena didn’t know was that June (Elisabeth Moss) was hiding among the sea of white wings of handmaids, as she plotted and pulled off the major coup of drugging Commanders (via the wedding cake), leaving many of them vulnerable to be killed so that the other handmaids could escape. June, Moira (Samira Wiley) and Janine (Madeline Brewer) even convinced Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) to let them go in a revelatory scene that was six seasons in the making.

“I wanted to honor the integrity of what that handmaids costume is and has been for so long,” says Kavanagh of the new red robes for the well-attended event. “Into some of the sleeves was a little pocket for a knife, for weapons. There was a lot of action. We had to make everything user friendly, and everyone had a stunt double. We also knew it was going to be powerful for the fans to see Lizzie [Moss, who goes by “Lizzie”] back in the handmaids costume. We took a lot of time and energy to make sure we had everything just perfect.”

One Commander who must have skipped dessert was Wharton, for he was very much awake when he happily carried his new bride into their home. But the bliss ended mere minutes later when, in a shocking moment of irony (reminiscent to when Serena became a handmaid herself in season five), a handmaid was waiting for the Whartons in their parlor.

“I was genuinely enraged at seeing the red and the handmaid standing there,” Strahovski recalls of the scene. The color red, as the show’s creative team has shared, is only used in the Gilead sets and reserved for the handmaids, so the flash of color alone brought Strahovski back to earlier seasons. “I hadn’t been in the Gilead setting in forever, or in a Commander’s house with the whole interior design, and it now being Serena’s house. So it was genuinely jarring in real life for me, as the person playing Serena, to see the handmaid there.”

The discovery launches Serena and Wharton into an epic war of words about their diverging beliefs. The argument was so powerful it wasn’t clear if Wharton was going to kill her, lock her up or let her leave.

“I’ve invested so much in Serena and the world, I just went ahead and infused those feelings into the day’s work,” Strahovski recalls. “It was so interesting that I had been so deeply affected by it. This show has taken on such meaning for audiences globally, and it has taken on similar meaning to me.”

She recalls only one other scene in the entire series when Serena yells at a man with such intensity. “It felt reminiscent of the time when Joe [Fiennes, who played the late Commander Waterford] and I were in the lake house and I called him a fucking idiot,” she recalls of the season two scene.

Despite Wharton puffing his chest in a terrifying bid to control his new wife, however, Serena fights back. She reminds him of what she has already survived — “and I will survive you!” She grabs son Noah and, almost unbelievably, he lets her walk out the door, and she runs.

“I remember feeling terrified as Serena in that moment that he was going to lock her up in a room and be done with it,” she says, “She found her voice and I think she felt like she could [yell at him] because they had a genuine connection. They talked a lot about reform and agreed on the kind of reform they were going to pursue together in New Bethlehem. They agreed politically and he did support her, or made her believe that he did, so maybe that’s where her bravery came from. She was appealing to the person that she did fall for.”

Charles says he was so committed to the scene that he nearly lost his voice during filming. “It’s all glowy, post-nuptial excitement, and then suddenly it’s just shattered. I wanted to give [Yvonne] something to react to and be shocked by — that level of brutality and violence erupting out of him,” he tells THR of how he played the scene. “Wharton feels misunderstood in that moment, very hurt that what he was hoping could work out on an unconscious level is shattering it front of him. That this ideal of what he wants to make work really can’t. He’s torn between who he is and who he aspires to be.”

One person who had warned Serena ahead of time was June, when Serena’s former handmaid had accused her of once again “subjugating herself” to another powerful Gilead man by marrying Wharton. When Serena argued that Wharton was kind, June reminded Serena that Fred Waterford was also kind when they first married, before he became a Gilead Commander. Those words are likely ringing in Serena’s ears when she tells Wharton that he can’t be a good man, because he’s a Commander, before she leaves him.

“June knows Serena better than anyone and June is almost always right about Serena,” Moss tells THR of the message behind that warning shot. “But June also will never give up on the idea of somebody making the right choice. I think that can be to a fault, because that doesn’t always work out for her.”

Moss, who directs the final two episodes of the series, teases, “There are characters in these final two episodes where some will make the right choice, and some do not.”

Does Strahovski agree with June, and does she think Serena will start making the right choices?

“I think she would definitely agree with June but, again, and as the one who is inside Serena’s brain and heart, I think she genuinely felt like she had no option,” she says. “So she really leant into attention from this guy and the fact that he was different from Fred, she convinced herself this was the version that was better and was going to work because she literally had no other choice. And now that she has a baby in the picture, it just made the stakes that much higher.”

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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.