THE ending of The Handmaid’s Tale series may have been ruined by author Margaret Atwood, who has just released a sequel.
The celebrated writer’s new novel, The Testaments, which is set over a decade after the events of her 1985 book on which the show is based, hit shelves today.
In season three, June has been focused on bringing down Gilead[/caption]
Margaret Atwood released her latest chapter in the Gilead saga today[/caption]
And while promoting the eagerly-anticipated release, which fans couldn’t wait to snap up, Atwood, 79, let slip that the totalitarian regime of Gilead will be destroyed.
“As we knew from Book One, Gilead does end,” she said in an interview with Weekend Edition Saturday.
She went on to add that her inspiration was George Orwell’s famous novel 1984.
Atwood posed with two women dressed as characters from the novel[/caption]
“[Orwell] did that very deliberately,” she said. “He doesn’t tell us how [the world of 1984] ends, but he gives us the signal that it is ended…”
The Canadian writer then went on to tease a ‘double agent’ twist that may well be written into the series.
“So it may not surprise you to know that I was pretty interested in double agents and people working from inside totalitarian regimes, against those regimes, when I was writing this book,” she said.
The first season of The Handmaid’s Tale, which streams on Hulu in the US and airs on Channel 4 in the UK, ended at the final chapter of the book.
June is kept as a handmaid because she is fertile.[/caption]
Subsequent seasons have followed their own path but Atwood did give showrunner Bruce Miller an indication of where things where going to go as she penned her sequel so they didn’t clash.
The Testaments does not revolve around the character of Offred/ June (played by Elisabeth Moss) but instead focuses on the downfall of Gilead from the perspective of three female narrators.
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One is Aunt Lydia, who looks after the handmaids and is played by Ann Dowd in the series, and the others are June’s grown-up daughters Nichole and Hannah, who has been re-named Agnes.
The Testaments has also been picked-up for the TV treatment by Hulu, while The Handmaid’s Tale will return for a fourth season in 2020.
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