You talked about the guilt and shame that the character has maybe grown up with for a long time. A lot of that comes from religion. You grew up religious, correct?
Yeah, Catholic home.
Do you feel like it took time for you to reckon with internalized, I don’t know, guilt about sex and desire?
Oh, God. Yes. I mean, I was scared to death about the idea of having sex before marriage. I mean, you’re terrified. I came from a loving home. They didn’t have a stick over my head, but I remember saying to my father, “Dad, if you can’t have sex before you get married, it’s going to be a problem. Why? Because they want to get married so they can have sex. They don’t even know if they like each other. They’re just attracted to each other. What kind of idea is that? Ridiculous.” I remember him saying, “I’m glad you thought through that, but you cannot have that opinion.” That’s what he said: “You cannot have that opinion.” “Okay, Dad.” I was a rebel, though. My poor father—drove him mad—and he’s the dearest man in the world. And my mother as well.
I mean, it does take a bit. I went to Mass yesterday, being Easter Sunday, and I was very glad to be there. I would say there are things that I don’t connect with—plenty of things that are said even in the Mass—but I felt very good being there. And there are many good things, too. You know, love one another. That was the rule in our house: love one another. That’s pretty good. I mean, it’s all personal, isn’t it? It’s what you feel good about.
Handmaid’s came out in 2017, in the middle of Me Too. Now that we’ve seen… I hope it’s not the other side of that, but we’ve come through some of these discussions and now we’re back in a different Trump presidency. What has it been like for you to witness, over the past 20, 30 years, how the place of women in society has changed, what we’ve won and also lost?
It’s painful, you know, what’s happened to women’s rights. I was just reading about that group of men—I don’t even know the name of their organization—that think we would be better off if women didn’t vote. And on top of that, there are groups of women who agree with that and think their place is in the home. If you want to be home in your marriage, knock yourself out. Good for you. But don’t think you have the right to decide for anyone else. Roe v. Wade—come on now.
I remember when we first started Handmaid’s, and Trump was getting close to winning, I went to bed in a kind of panic thinking, It’s going to be Hillary. It can’t be him. I woke up and opened the door in the morning to get the paper, and there it was—New York Times: Trump. I remember texting Lizzie [Moss], and I said, “What are we going to do?” And she wrote back in Latin, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” That’s something we have to remember. Use our voices, stay alert, be aware, put the phone down, speak up. Don’t expect someone to do it for you, because that won’t happen. It is your civic duty to speak up in protest.
