June and Janine are done with Gilead.
After what seems like a lifetime of state-sanctioned rape, of violence, of being used for their bodies and robbed of their rights, they tell it straight to Aunt Lydia.
“We, all of us, together, we’ve had enough,” June informs their designated oppressor in the most recent episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“They hurt us, they raped us,” Janine tells Lydia and her quivering lip, the handmaid’s own battered face serving as proof of her words.
“You gave us to them ... If you want to save us, let us go.”
It’s been eight years since New Jersey’s Madeline Brewer made her debut in the landmark Hulu series.
And it’s been been eight years since her character, Janine Lindo, lost her right eye for daring to challenge the ruling authority in the dystopian drama, set in the patriarchal, misogynistic Republic of Gilead. The regime, having seized power in the former United States, routinely subjects enslaved women to rape and forced pregnancy.
Now, as the Emmy-winning series approaches its final episodes, Brewer is reflecting on her time as Janine, her character’s journey and how the show has come to mirror reality for American women during its six-season run.
“I feel like I’ve struck gold,” Brewer tells NJ Advance Media from London. “I loved being on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ It’s been one of the greatest joys of my life. I’m very, very proud.”
The actor grew up in South Jersey, in Pitman, before she was cast in her first TV role, as Tricia Miller in Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black.” Brewer, a former Miss Pitman, was nominated for her first Emmy in 2021 for her performance in “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“I’ll miss playing Janine ... I’ll miss diving into her world,” she says. “But I know that it’s time. We finished our time together in a really beautiful way that I’m exceptionally proud of her and of me and of the show, so it’s a good time to let it go.”
The landmark series, based on the stunning 1985 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, was created by Bruce Miller and produced by Montclair’s Warren Littlefield, a former NBC TV executive. The next episode premieres Tuesday, May 20 and the series finale is set for May 27.
In recent events on the show, June Osborne, played by Emmy winner and executive producer Elisabeth Moss, leads a group handmaids in their red dresses and white bonnets to fight back in Gilead through a post-wedding plot — with the assistance of some drugged cake.
“We took the clothes they used to enslave us to liberate us,” June says.
“The dress became our uniform and we became an army.”

Surviving hell
Janine meets protagonist June in the first season of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Under the brutal government of Gilead, both women have been separated from their children and forced to become handmaids, charged with producing offspring for all-powerful commanders and their wives via “ceremonies,” which is just a twisted way of saying rape.
Janine starts out with a frank, spirited quality. She’s too free to submit to the oppressive conditions of this new life.
“Welcome to the frickin’ loony bin,” she says, reacting to the sheer ridiculousness of the situation at hand.
The forces of Gilead respond by stealing half her vision.

“She first comes in very resilient, very fiery, and then her eye is taken away from her,” says Brewer, 33. “And I think something about that really changes her. She realizes she might not be able to survive this, and definitely not the way that she is.
“That’s when she ... kind of loses it a little bit. I think that in season one, she wants to commit suicide. Personally, I think that that’s what she wanted to do, but she chooses to stay, and she knows that the only way that she can stay is to not check out, but to go somewhere else mentally.”
The character starts projecting an almost childlike presence.
“We see a Janine that’s very much ... in survival mode,” the actor says. “She’s finding the silver lining. She’s trying to enjoy what’s been put in front of her.”

Giving birth to her baby, Charlotte — named Angela by the Putnams, the family of Gilead abusers she’s forced to live with — changes the stakes for Janine.
So does the death of her handmaid friends.
“There’s a scene in season four where she says (to June) ‘You know, I’m not a mushroom, so you can’t keep me in the dark and feed me lies and sh-- and expect me to just be OK with it.’ I think that that’s Janine kind of coming out of this fragility that she’s been in for so many seasons. She’s starting to realize that she has to be an active participant in escaping, or taking Gilead down, and then once she realizes June got out, I think that she’s just feeling so grateful.”
New Janine, same old Gilead
As “The Handmaid’s Tale” entered its sixth and final season, June’s fight against Gilead raged on.
To carry out her quest for justice, she had to leave the safety of life outside the totalitarian state and return to the hell she escaped.
But her friend Janine was nowhere to be found.
They had long been separated, leaving June to fear the worst.
By the third episode, viewers learned that Brewer’s character was alive and posted at Jezebel’s, a brothel frequented by commanders.

However, this was not the Janine from season one.
“When we meet her at Jezebel’s, she has fully changed,” Brewer says. “She’s so much more strong, she’s more resilient, and she’s also found a purpose, which is all Janine has ever wanted, is to have purpose.”
She’s survived a lot, but the final season brings her alarmingly close to death.
When a rebel plot to slaughter commanders and rescue the women at Jezebel’s is exposed, all of the women are executed — except Janine. She is saved, only to become the handmaid of another abusive commander.
She’s been known as the property of several men in the show. They’ve called her Ofwarren, Ofdaniel, Ofhoward and Ofjoseph, in line with Gilead’s handmaid naming custom. The latest: Ofpaul, for Commander Paul Bell (Timothy Simons).

People like June and Aunt Lydia (in her own way) always want to protect Janine. Despite their intentions, she keeps being thrown into more horrors of this patriarchal society. Once again, she’s beaten, assaulted and expected to survive.
With any hope of escape, it’s always one step forward, three steps back.
Villain Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), the Gilead wife who held June captive as the handmaid “Offred,” seems to be softening, wanting to reform the republic. She speaks of lessening the burden on handmaids in New Bethlehem, which is billed as a less bleak, more diplomatic version of dystopia.
But as Serena soon learns, the men of Gilead will not change, even for her — the widow of a commander who has both given birth to her own child and married another commander. If any woman gains a foothold to power, the men swiftly claw it back.

All hope for a new day under the same regime is utter delusion.
“It is definitely something that kind of mirrors our society,” Brewer says. “Just because you are the most favored of the oppressed class does not make you any less oppressed. Even for Janine, just because you’re Aunt Lydia’s favorite doesn’t mean that you’re any less in danger just because you’ve been singled out as an important person.
“(With) Serena Joy, she created the system. She was the architect of her own unhappiness, and she knows that the system is bad and wrong, but now it’s out of her control. She’s working within a broken system, and that’s kind of how I feel about the United States sometimes. It’s like we’re doing all we can to create a society that is beneficial to all of its citizens, but we’re working within a white supremacist system, so it’s never going to benefit all of its citizens — that’s kind of Gilead. That’s kind of Serena’s place in Gilead right now. She’s working within a misogynistic system."

Gilead comes to America
Life for women in the real America was different when “The Handmaid’s Tale” premiered in April 2017.
At that time, women across the country had the constitutional right to an abortion, as they had since Roe v. Wade in 1973.
This month, the show’s series finale arrives in a post-Roe world.
When President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, protesters wore the red cloaks and white “wings" of the handmaids from the show. Their silent presence outside Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing made a statement against his record on abortion and health care for women.
Later that month, Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault in testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kavanaugh, who denied the allegations, was nonetheless confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.

“We are not ‘a few steps from The Handmaid’s Tale,’” CNN’s Brian Stelter tweeted in 2018. “I don’t think this kind of fear-mongering helps anybody.”
But when Texas passed a law that banned most abortions there in 2021, Stelter deleted that sentiment.
Then, in 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Mothers and grandmothers watched as their daughters and grandchildren lost the reproductive rights they had for nearly 50 years.
Kavanaugh was part of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Brewer was among those who spoke out in the wake of the decision.
“I had an abortion when I was 20,” she shared on Instagram in 2022. “I hated myself and my body and punished myself for years but I never even for the blink of an eye regretted it. Today my life is mine. I can’t wait to be a mother someday on my own terms.”

Janine had an abortion storyline in the fourth season of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The episode aired the year before Roe was overturned.
In a flashback to 2013, before the rise of Gilead — where fertile women like Janine are forced to bear children for the childless elite — she chooses to terminate a pregnancy. She makes the decision to protect her life as a single mother with a young son. But when she arrives at what she thinks is a clinic, she is pressured to keep the pregnancy at what turns out to be a “crisis pregnancy center.” She later finds her way to a real clinic.
“It was definitely very impactful to do the fourth season and kind of take on Janine’s storyline, being that I have a personal relationship to it,” Brewer says. “It’s definitely taken on a new meaning.”
The actor recently watched a video about a Texas politician going so far as to call for testing the water supply for hormonal birth control and abortion pills.

“They’re trying to outlaw abortion pills and birth control pills because what it boils down to is they want to have control over women,” Brewer says. “They want to have control of women’s bodies. They want to be able to tell women what to do with their bodies. And that is so ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ that’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ right to a tee. So I think our world has gone farther toward Gilead in the six seasons since we started shooting, but what I hope is that it’s a last gasp. I think that people like that are outnumbered, or at least I hope they are.”
Brewer says because of her work in the show, she’s often heard from people sharing their personal experiences.
“I get a decent amount of DMs from people, especially after the first season,” she says. “For a lot of women who have children, the thought of having their baby taken from them was so traumatizing ... I also think a lot of women can relate to Janine’s resilience and her love of her children and her love of her friends. I have a lot of people talk about that.
“I definitely had some people DM me about their own abortion story and, you know, to see an abortion story of a grown woman that isn’t about, like, a 15-year-old can be really powerful to people ... especially because in Janine’s story, she already has a child, so it’s not that she doesn’t want children, it’s that she knows that this situation isn’t right for her and that she can’t provide for this would-be child ... so she chooses her already-born child, and she chooses herself ... there’s nothing wrong with that, I think it’s a really powerful message.”

Just this year, the Trump administration was considering giving $5,000 “baby bonuses” to mothers after the birth of a child, as an apparent strategy to incentivize parenthood.
“Whether I was on the show or not, I think hearing a president say they’ll offer $5,000 bonuses to women who have children — not get pregnant ... the baby comes out, then they get their $5,000 bonus — that is surreal in and of itself,” Brewer says. “But the conversation around pregnancy and around abortion has definitely changed for me now that I am on the show.
“There are days of this administration — the first time and this time — where you kind of have to think ‘Oh, God, is this a joke? Is this satire and I’m living in a satirical dark comedy about the United States?’ I think the important thing to remember, though, is that it’s been proven true that people want access to reproductive health care. It’s a very popular thing, and it’s not going anywhere, and the people will not allow for a full outlaw of abortion in the United States. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t think it’s what people want, and I know that I’m certainly going to continue to fight for every person who can can get pregnant — I will be fighting for their right to reproductive health care."

Goodbye, Aunt Lydia. Hello, wedded bliss.
Janine has a famously complicated relationship with Aunt Lydia.
Lydia, an authority in charge of the handmaids at Gilead’s Red Center, is her oppressor. But in Lydia’s eyes, she’s her protector.
She calls Janine her “special girl.”
Brewer says it was cathartic for Janine to confront Lydia — played by the always magnificent Ann Dowd — in the eighth episode this season.
“That happens throughout the season where Janine gets to try and and get Lydia to see the light,” she says. “The relationship between the two of them is so fraught, but there’s a lot of love there. And I think out of that love, she’s not just there with June asking ‘Lydia, can you please let these girls go?’ She’s also hoping that this woman that she does love (can) see that she’s also been lied to, and that this system is broken. And it was never meant to to uplift women. It was meant to keep them down in every role.”

Dowd, who won an Emmy for her performance in the show, isn’t leaving the “Handmaid’s” universe.
She’ll appear as Aunt Lydia in the upcoming sequel series “The Testaments." The Hulu show, based on Atwood’s 2019 novel set 15 years after the events in the first book, is another production from Miller and Littlefield.
As Brewer has been promoting the last run of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” she has also been celebrating the recent release of the final season of Netflix’s “You.”
She stars alongside Penn Badgley as Louise “Bronte” Flannery in the fifth season of the psychological thriller series.
“I’ve definitely been very busy over the course of the last several weeks — two shows coming out at the same time, also two shows that deal very heavily with misogyny and patriarchy," Brewer says.

“So a lot of the conversations have kind of overlapped, which has actually been really nice, because I get to talk about those projects that I’m very passionate about ... I feel really honored to be in the final seasons of two shows that I love and that I think are worthy of very important conversation, and it’s been really special to be a part of their legacy.”
Brewer has films coming down the pike, too, including the thriller “I Live Here Now” with Lucy Fry (“Godfather of Harlem”) and “Twin Peaks” star Sheryl Lee. The movie, the feature directorial debut of Julie Pacino, Al Pacino’s daughter, will premiere this summer at Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.
But the actor is also headed for a personal milestone — her wedding.

In 2022, Brewer made her stage debut in London’s West End as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.” While living in London, she met British cinematographer and producer Jack Thompson-Roylance on the high-profile dating app Raya.
They got engaged in New York in January 2024 and are set to be married in England this July.
“There’s going to be plenty of friends and family from Pitman coming over to England and just kind of celebrating this incredible moment,” Brewer says. “I never thought I’d get married, and then I met Jack, and so I’m just totally thrilled and very excited for this next chapter of my life and our life, and it feels like a really beautiful way to end. I’ve closed the chapter on two very big series, and now I’m starting a new chapter, and I’m so excited for what’s next.”
“The Handmaid’s Tale” continues on Hulu with the penultimate episode of the series premiering Tuesday, May 20. The series finale arrives May 27.
Stories by Amy Kuperinsky
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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.