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How Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory changed the way Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale was created, according to Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood and MGM Television were filming an adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale – then along came Donald Trump
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On November 9, 2016 the world woke up to see that Donald Trump had won the U.S. presidential election. This was a seismic event that changed things for everyone. At the time, MGM Television was filming a television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, with author Margaret Atwood serving as consulting producer. All of a sudden, the entire context of the project had changed.
Atwood’s 1985 novel explored a dystopian future where religious zealots had turned the United States into a fascist nation, stripping women of their rights. The novel was meant to be a warning, but the 2016 election called everything into question. Some of the policies Trump and his allies were championing sounded all too familiar for Atwood and the producers. So, how did this change the series? In some ways it changed nothing, but in other ways it changed everything.
During an appearance on the PBS show Brief but Spectacular, Atwood spoke about how Trump’s 2016 victory fundamentally changed everything about The Handmaid’s Tale television series without a single script being rewritten.
“We knew on November 9, everybody in the show, and we were several months into shooting by that time, woke up on that morning and said to themselves, ‘We’re in a different show.’ Not because anything changed. Nothing changed in the scripts in the first season. But the frame was going to be different, and the frame was different. Instead of, ‘Look what we just avoided,’ people reacted to it as, ‘Here it comes.’ Everybody was very unsettled around that time. I think there still is an unsettled feeling.”
The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale is currently airing on Hulu.
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