Joseph Fiennes: The Handmaid's Tale Is What Happens When Men Have Too Much Power

Fiennes discusses what it's like to play the primary male character in a story about men ruining everything.
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Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale is a series almost overflowing with strange, disturbing visuals, but a half-hour into its first season, it's Joseph Fiennes who puts you face to face with the image you'll never unsee. In a lushly decorated bedroom, Fiennes stands fully clothed, watch on wrist, over a bored-looking young woman spread-eagled on a bed, thrusting into her while wearing a directionless thousand-yard stare until he reaches restrained, unceremonious orgasm. Another woman sits upright and joyless in the bed, watching.

It's as jarring to watch as it sounds; harrowing for reasons it's hard to quite pin down except that it's definitely Fiennes's tortured mid-coitus performance that all the uneasy vibes are emanating from. You've seen this face and might have even seen it once as William Shakespeare himself, but this person onscreen is somebody else entirely, a nightmare you've never seen before.

In this new adaptation of the classic dystopian Margaret Atwood novel, a future United States has been overtaken by a theocracy that attempts to strip away the human rights of women. Fiennes plays Commander Fred Waterford, head of the household where Elisabeth Moss's titular handmaid (known in the story as Offred) works as, essentially, a fertility slave, kept by the Commander and his wife for the sole purpose of bearing the Commander's children. Fiennes talked to GQ about why he frequently thought about his daughters while filming The Handmaid's Tale, what November 9 felt like on the set, and, of course, the elusive onscreen male orgasm.


GQ: You play one of the only men in a story about men creating a dystopian future for women. That must feel strange. How are you, uh... how are you feeling about men these days?
Joseph Fiennes: It's interesting, isn't it? I came upon it looking at it as a study of male control and power, and all that is rotten and corrupt, and people who feel they're untouchable. We see that every day in our lives today—people working at big networks who have to get fired because of history that has gone on for decades, for example. There is that untouchable quality with power.

Of course, it's all through Offred's lens. It's the handmaid's tale. It's her perspective. It's interesting; it's a male-dominated, totalitarian theocracy, but we don't really hear any of them. We get to see them through her eyes, and get a sense and a grasp of them through Offred, and particularly her relationship with the Commander. That is really where it hangs for me. It's their interaction. What is that about? It's so curious—could be tender, but also abusive and abhorrent and horrific. He partly wants to reach out and care for her, but all the members of Gilead are architects of their own unhappiness and they inflict unhappiness through a life of servitude on Offred and other handmaids. Sex is not allowed. It's only for procreation, so of course, there's this great hypocrisy. They stripped the world of everything to claim back a moral integrity, and they break the rules privately. Everyone smokes; they read literature; everything that they say is forbidden, they do.

There's this strange thing where the Commander can't help himself, like a cat with a ball of string, just to play with her in that controlling way. Whenever her intelligence rears up and shows itself, he shuts the door. There is this wonderful complexity between the two of them; her need to serve at any length, his awareness of that, his need to address the issues with the previous Offred, who killed herself because of the awful circumstance. At the same time, he just cannot but help himself to continue the abuse. I think it's a wonderful look at male power and the struggle.

Had you read the novel before you signed on for the project?
No. I had read the first episode, and he was very thinly drawn, so I was like, "Okay, I've got to read the novel." I had the job then, and I came away thinking, This is a tall order to adapt.

But I was really taken about how Atwood never allows the ball to drop. There are these extraordinary moments where Offred is carrying us through the narrative, and then her thoughts go back in time and among relationships. They're just observations, but the energy never drops. Obviously, when you're in the film, you're interrupted with the shots and the lenses and the editing and the music. How do you maintain what Atwood does? There is this extraordinary crisp, haunting energy, and level of observation and wit that never, never lets you down. But all the stars have aligned and all the talents have converged, and what we see onscreen is something which is spellbinding and tense.

From a viewer perspective, it really does feel like it's showing things I've never seen on screen before. Like in the very first episode, you have this sex scene that's a very... non-traditional sex scene, you might say. Fully clothed and with an audience, essentially. Can you tell me what you remember about the day you filmed that?
I can't bear any of those sort of scenes. [laughs] How do you deliver them in the way with the sensitivity and integrity and engage the audience and not have them repelled? But I guess in this case we all knew the weight of what was going on. It's a theocracy. It's a thinly veiled excuse to rape a woman through scripture, and so we understood the nature of it. But it's a great company and we all have a great amount of humor that goes along with the weight of what we're doing. We got through it. It was a lot of discussion.

What kind of discussion?
I think, in general, the position, the ritual, this arcane ritual—how do we exact it? Everyone in their own world, what this means to them all. Also, it's the first one of many, so where do you go? There's a moment when this point of cold contact actually begins to awaken something in the Commander, and it all gets a bit confusing. And here's a woman who is in a prison, a life of servitude, the weakest, lowest caste member, and yet she's the most powerful person in the room because she's fertile. All of these sort of discussions.

That scene actually features a male orgasm, and it made me realize how rarely you see male orgasms onscreen. Women, it's a different story. But men—it's such a distinct, physical phenomenon that has to be instantly recognizable when you can't reveal too much. So how do you prepare for that? Did that require any, ah, coaching of any sort?
Any coaching? No, we didn't cover that in drama school. [laughs] I think you're so steeped in the character, in the objectives, in their needs and wants as characters, that it's like everything: You just play the scene and don't over-intellectualize it. I was always aware that it was a scene we'd [revisit throughout the series], unfortunately, again and again. That was more in my mind. There's zero eye contact [in the first iteration], and then slowly it becomes a semblance of eye contact and it begins to become something else that's more frightening and abhorrent to Offred, but less about the orgasm. But you're right. Maybe it's still a taboo.

A lot of the discussion around The Handmaid's Tale, here in the U.S. especially, is linked to the election and the administration we find ourselves living under. When you were filming it, was that a discussion on set?
Of course. This is a political, feminist piece, and of course it comes into sharp focus. Even just as you live and breathe it, much is hanging everything under the new administration. It surrounded us in every way, but, yes, it came into a much sharper focus during the election. Because this was green-lit before the primaries, but as we were filming, the election was going on, and then the results came in as we were filming.

I think the show could go on and should go on, because through this particular lens, we get to hang a mirror up to ourselves and society and we stay alert.

What was the day after the election like on set?
It was very, very quiet. That's what I recall. I came in that day and I just remember there was a sort of filtering, an absorbing of where we are and the new administration and this piece of work. It's easy to throw everything on the new administration, and I think we should and always challenge and be vocal and not go to sleep. That's what Atwood's cautionary tale is about, but also to remind us that everything that's in the novel has been witnessed before. It's a story of the horrors of fundamentalism from whatever aspect. I think we thought about art and life imitating each other. There was a great stillness and quiet and responsibility, I think, felt by all.

Are you talking about a second season yet, or is the general thinking that this will be a standalone story?
No one has told me. I'm hoping to corner the [producer Bruce Miller] today and quietly ask him where are we going. I know that he has been vocal about this, and there is lots of material and places to go. We pretty much by Episode 10 exhausted the book. I think there are places like the Colonies that are mentioned but we never visited in the book. I think that's an example of where one could go. And there's a lot more we could do about our rights and votes and climate change.

I think the show could go on and should go on, because through this particular lens, we get to hang a mirror up to ourselves and society and, with that caution, we stay alert and make ourselves vocal about it.

You mentioned that you felt a new sense of "responsibility" in telling this story, and I've heard people say that watching this show has made them feel a little bit justified in fearing for the worst. Do you think about that as a role of the show, that it is making people feel justified in resisting and keeping vigilant?
Yes, absolutely. Vocal, vigilant, alert, awake. Don't get consumed by technology and fall asleep about what is going on with the authority in power. Completely. Yes, yes, yes.

The most important people in my life are three women: my wife and my two daughters. I want [my daughters] to grow up in a world where they have equal rights, equal pay if they're doing a job equivalent to their male counterpart. Looking at predictions, if a woman is going to get parity in pay, it seems like it'll be in the year 2049. If you're a black woman, it's not until the year 2124. If you're a Hispanic woman, this is where it gets almost like a sci-fi scenario: You're not going to get parity in pay until the year—I think it's 2248. That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. I don't want my daughters to be waiting that long. So, yes, we all have to be vigilant, and we have to keep pushing. This is part of our evolution.

You must have thought about your daughters a lot working on this.
I did. They're five and seven [laughs] and I can't wait to introduce them to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.


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