In an interview, the actor discussed the end of Season 4, the future of the show and the emotional toll of playing “an ugly, pathetic, misogynist monster.”
This interview includes spoilers for the season finale of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Praise be, at last: Fred Waterford, the inscrutably sadistic commander at the center of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has met his demise. And Joseph Fiennes, the actor who plays him, couldn’t wait to peel off his skin.
“We ended at 6:00 in the morning, I went straight to the makeup trailer and off came Fred’s beard so I could begin the process of shedding the horror,” Fiennes said about shooting the Season 4 finale, in which an enraged June (Elisabeth Moss) gives as good as she gets.
After learning that her rapist and tormentor has saved himself from prison by becoming a government informant, June persuades her allies to implement a bait and switch. Fred, who thinks he’s headed to a life of freedom, will be turned over to Gilead and its draconian justice system — the one he helped to construct and inflict upon its women.
But just when it seems that things can’t get any worse for him, he’s handed off to her.
“Run,” June orders a shackled Fred into unoccupied territory between Canada and the United States. And suddenly women pour out of dense woods, as June and her cadre of Gilead refugees enact their own salvaging — the ceremonial public executions that handmaids were forced to participate in. When we last see Fred, he is hanging on a wall — his severed finger in an envelope addressed to his wife, Serena (Yvonne Strahovski).
Fiennes had been anticipating Fred’s death for a while now, ever since the showrunner Bruce Miller had hinted that Season 3 would be his last. “I’m lucky I got this far,” Fiennes recalled saying. But then that season came and went, and Miller told him that perhaps his demise would come in Season 4 instead.
“I’m just thrilled it happened at the finale,” Fiennes said. “I think it’s great for the audience to have that catharsis.”
He was calling on Zoom from his home in Majorca, his face clean-shaven and his shirt the color of the Mediterranean, and unbuttoned far lower than his fundamentalist TV power-player would dare. He’d shot his final scenes in March, he said, and since then had been meditating on “losing the residue of Fred Waterford.” He admitted that he’d felt rather blue shooting his swan song amid pandemic anxiety, with his family halfway around the world.
“It’s hardly an uplifting show, or indeed an enlightened, uplifting being that I’m portraying,” he said. “They’re not all the components that really make you want to jump out of bed.”
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
So Fred finally gets his comeuppance. What do you imagine he was thinking in his final moments?
I love that when he arrives at the woods, he’s chained at the neck and shackled. I think if anything, Fred now has a taste of what fear feels like, and has felt like, for all the people that his regime has put through hell. In many ways it’s what the audience needs. But Fred also needs it. Part of his release and catharsis is that he needs to taste that to fully comprehend. You can’t explain that intellectually to those people.
What were the physical demands of that scene in which he is chased and then beaten at his own salvaging?
They filmed that wonderfully through a very, very thick, muddy, cold forest at three in the morning with this high camera on wires that would zip along at 20 miles an hour. As fast as you could run, it would be ahead of you. I only had to do this run three or four times, and then it was left to a stuntman on the wide shots. But I’m pretty sure, apart from one drone shot, that any pain inflicted upon Fred was inflicted upon me. I was padded up so people could let rip and throw the boot in. It was genuinely quite terrifying.
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Even before the salvaging, there are moments when Fred seems to comprehend the pain he inflicted on the women of Gilead after learning that Serena is pregnant with his child, a son. Then there is June’s searing testimony laying out his abuse of her.
It’s important for Fred that Serena’s being able to give birth to a boy ticks all the Gilead boxes. And the sense that he might lose that gives him a newfound perspective. Those several months he’s spent in this five-star cell have given him moments of reflection, not only how to wriggle out of facing the responsibility, but to reposition the narrative to blame the victim as any predator might do. But underneath that, there is a sense that he’s hearing loud and clearly the horrors he has inflicted.
Is that enough to bring about redemption?
No, Fred is a repeat offender — an ugly, pathetic, misogynist monster that will never change. I felt like Fred wouldn’t redeem himself in the way that we want to see in movies. And I stayed, I feel, the more difficult course, which was to actually stick with his love of power and the predatory aspect that’s hidden behind this theocracy, this belief, this religion.
The people who have to change are the forgivers, which is the interesting paradox of June’s journey: She becomes the thing that she seeks to destroy. She brings Gilead full-on back into Canada. Of course June is the horrific product, and it’s no fault of hers.
You’ve said that Fred was rather thinly sketched in Margaret Atwood’s novel. How did you fill him out?
There were clues in the book. One, which I love and really is the basis of Fred, is that Atwood describes him as this pathetic withering limb that lives inside a military boot. And so the mahogany desk, the double-breasted suit, the beard — all the armor, if you like — belied the truth of his pathetic-ness. It’s a meditation on the corrosive effects of ego and power more than extremist religious beliefs.
And yet he has sometimes come across as, dare I say, rather appealing. Was that intentional?
Yeah, definitely. I always wanted him to toe the Gilead line and not shake from that belief, but also be human. I just feel the more human, the more terrifying he is. It’s a complex line, where you have to honor the face of Gilead and the person that we want to see taken down. You can’t become too transcendent because what are we fighting against?
What’s your interpretation of that final scene between June and Luke after the salvaging, where she holds her baby, Nicole, as he sits on the floor looking stricken?
I think June is a different woman, much to the horror of Luke. She metaphorically and literally has blood on her hands. It’s that paradox of revenge. She is the product of Gilead now.
I found it very moving and difficult to watch. We want as an audience to stand up, to cheer. But at the expense of someone losing their spiritual higher self? Bring down the regime, fight back — I’m all for that. But what we see is that this has opened up even more wounds and won’t bring the closure that they seek.
What was it like for the cast to be mired in brutality across four seasons?
At the core there was a deep love and respect among us, and a sense of honoring Atwood via Bruce. And also the prescience of the piece. Because of the strange clairvoyance of our writers, we knew there were many parallels that were very real to people. So there’s a responsibility that goes with that. It’s a sense of knowing that we are participating in an extraordinary narrative, a vital, important feminist narrative that reflects upon our circumstance today.
But there were always cheerful, wonderful moments and interactions. And maybe the more dark and complex the piece, the more happy and funny and jovial everyone is. Maybe if it was a comedy we’d all be at each other’s throats.
What about the criticism that the show amounts to torture porn?
I get that, and that’s a valid response. Yes, in many circumstances it might have leaned too far. But I feel that we’ve never got into a gratuitous form of violence. I feel it’s been justified. If I think about torture and mutilation outside of our dystopian world, in the real world, it goes on. And we haven’t shirked that reality.
How long do you think the show can go on, and how long should it go on?
Now Fred’s out, obviously the show’s over. It should just stop. [Laughs]
We’ve got “The Testaments” [Atwood’s 2019 sequel], and so how wonderful to segue into that. Bruce doesn’t reveal much. He does say that he would love it to go on as long as Lizzy’s there, and I can understand the virtue of that. We’ve departed from the book, so I feel the landscape that’s been forged is still rich and ripe and fascinating.
What was it like saying goodbye to your castmates? I mean, Fred’s not going to come back from the dead, is he?
He is dead, but there are flashbacks, so who knows? [Laughs.] I miss them all, but it feels the right amount of time. I might have even overstayed my welcome. But in one’s life as an actor, you get one or two wonderful breaks. And as dark and difficult as this is, this has been one of those breaks.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
