Maid In Manhattan

With a disturbingly relevant narrative, The Handmaid’s Tale was the most timely drama series of 2017. Now it’s back for a second season, and its inimitable star Elisabeth Moss tells Jane Mulkerrins why the conversation around gender inequality and sexual abuse is set to get louder.

- Jane Mulkerrins

‘I’ve always considered myself a feminist. But, like a lot of women of my generation, I didn’t think we had to fight for it. I thought it was all done. I took so much for granted.’ Elisabeth Moss shakes her head, in regret at her – at all of our – folly. ‘We’ve had to take ownership of feminism in a way that we didn’t know we’d have to, and that’s changed me.’

It’s Saturday evening in a subterranean wine bar in Manhattan, and this is the same conversation I’ve been having with friends and colleagues on an almost daily basis since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and, subsequently, the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement. The only difference tonight is that, thanks to her role in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, the woman I’m discussing it with has become a symbol for the new resistance. As Off red, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s seminal feminist story, Moss plays a sexual slave in Gilead, a dystopian world in which women are not permitted to read or write, and in which their fertility – the ultimate currency – has been hijacked and commodified by a far-right, fundamentalist ruling elite. ‘I’ve never told a story that so closely paralleled life as it was happening around me, especially life as a 35-year-old woman in America,’ she says. ‘So the lines have gotten much more blurry than with any other role I’ve ever done. But it’s also really cathartic to take some of the anger and frustration that I feel as a citizen, and be able to tell a story that I believe in.’