Spoilers for The Handmaid's Tale Episode 5, “Faithful,” below.
The third installment of The Handmaid’s Tale, the most gut-wrenching hour of Hulu's timely dystopian drama so far, pivots on a raw, wordless performance from Alexis Bledel. Captured by the government of Gilead, a fundamentalist regime in which fertile women are enslaved as reproductive “handmaids,” Bledel’s character Emily is subjected to a series of emotional and physical torments to which she's unable to respond verbally; she is first muzzled, later rendered mute by horror. A silence this long is an unusual feat for any actor, but for Bledel—who rose to fame as one half of television’s most infamously motormouthed duo, the Gilmore Girls—it’s a revelation.
Speaking with Bledel in person, it seems intuitive that she would excel as a silent star; she is soft-spoken and thoughtful, often guarded, choosing her words carefully. Though this is not the first dark role she's taken since leaving Rory Gilmore behind in 2007 (she memorably played a depressed housewife in Mad Men's fifth season), Emily feels like a true reinvention. “The challenge of it was really appealing, because it is so different from the other work I’ve done,” she acknowledges, crediting Samantha Morton’s Oscar-nominated turn as a mute woman in Woody Allen’s The Sweet and Lowdown as inspiration for the character. “I was so moved by her performance, and I kept recalling it when I started working on this episode,” Bledel enthuses. “She communicated so much emotionally without speaking, and it stayed with me even though I only saw the movie once. I knew how much was possible without words.”
Before she’s silenced, Emily is a force of nature. Initially introduced as a meek Handmaid named Ofglen, dismissed by Elisabeth Moss’s Offred as “a pious little sh*t with a broomstick up her ass,” she soon reveals herself as the quiet embodiment of everything the regime fears most: a lesbian, an academic, and an active player in an underground resistance movement called Mayday. The moment she subtly reveals her true self to Offred, reminiscing about an ice cream store where the salted caramel was “better than sex… like, good sex” feels like a tiny miracle; a drop of water in a drought. In a world where Handmaids are permitted to speak only in dull, repetitive platitudes—“Blessed be the fruit,” “May the Lord open”—and sexual pleasure is verboten, Emily’s words are a potent moment of rebellion. You love her for it instantly, and so does Offred.
But Emily is discovered as a “gender traitor” (Gilead’s term for hom*osexuality) and captured along with her lover, a Martha—an infertile woman whose servitude is domestic rather than sexual. Handcuffed in a van, Emily and the nameless Martha cling desperately to each other, crying, just before the latter is dragged away and hanged. Though Bledel’s face is obscured by a muzzle and her back is half-turned to the camera, her reaction as her lover is executed is agonizing to watch. “We filmed that scene in one take, which made it all the more powerful to play,” Bledel recalls. “Because we were experiencing it in real time, it was unbroken action and you could feel how quickly it all happens, the shock of it. We only shot it a couple of times, so every time it felt just as abrupt.”
As one of this world’s few remaining fertile women, Emily is too valuable to execute, but her punishment, when it comes, is no less brutal. Awakening confused and in pain, under bright hospital lights with bandages between her legs, Emily is informed by the formidable Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) that her life will be much easier now. “You will not want what you cannot have,” Lydia says, with terrible gentleness, as the slow horror of the realization begins to sink in: while unconscious, Emily has undergone a forced cl*toridectomy. “She’s so vulnerable in that moment, so physically weak, and just trying to make sense of what’s happened to her,” Bledel recalls. “To have Aunt Lydia saunter in and inform her what has happened I think adds a level of confusion to the exchange, the fact that another woman is treating her this way.”
In this week’s episode, "Faithful," Emily returns as a shadow of her former self. She’s assigned as Handmaid to a new household; a gentle one with a playful dog and a Wife who seems deeply sympathetic to her plight. But her spark has gone out; she’s beyond comfort, and Bledel plays her hollowed-out numbness with devastating precision. “It’s nice to think she ends up in a place where there’s this tiny bit of kindness shown to her, and there’s a dog to play with,” Bledel muses, clearly still affected by this episode in particular. “But that actually makes it worse, I think. What happened to her is too traumatic, and she can’t process the fact that her life will never be the same, that she’ll never connect with another person in the same way.”
Emily’s ability to make a romantic and sexual connection, in the face of everything, was what kept her alive, Bledel says. Gilead did not break her, but having both her lover and her sexuality stripped from her might. “I think she connected with the Martha for survival, almost. They kept each other alive, and their spirits alive, by being in love and having this time together,” she muses. “So her new house just illustrates the fact that she’s not even in a place where she can appreciate those small kindnesses any more.” Watching her play fetch with the family dog, it’s clear Emily is trying to soothe herself, knowing she should be comforted by this simple ritual, “but she can’t feel it,” says Bledel.
Seeing Emily so broken makes her final stand in "Faithful"—which may also be her swan song in the show overall—all the more powerful. Out in the town square, she shares a brief moment of reconnection with Offred, finally sharing her real name. But the interaction is cut short, emphasizing just how alone Emily is now. In that moment "she feels such absolute loss," says Bledel. And that's when the turn comes. Seeing a car left briefly unattended by a driver, she jumps in and takes it for a joyride around the square, a brief smile breaking onto her face as the entire town watches in awe. A government car finally intervenes, blocking her in, but she's not done. Emily reverses the car into one of the many uniformed officials advancing on her—and then, after sharing a glance with Offred, drives over him, spraying blood everywhere. In this moment, as Offred later notes in voiceover, Emily is invincible.
“It’s both incredibly freeing and incredibly dangerous for her," says Bledel, "and I think it’s entirely impulsive. She’s always looking for an opportunity to either escape, or rebel, or recruit someone to Mayday. So when she sees this car door open, she decides on the spot she’s going to jump in. There is no plan. She’s taking a huge chance, and you can only imagine what happens to her after that is horrible, given what we know of Gilead.” Indeed, the last we see of Emily, she's being dragged away and bundled into a black van as Offred watches with a mix of horror and ferocious joy: "They didn't get everything. There was something inside her they couldn't take away."
The Handmaid's Tale has been a breakout show for Hulu; both their most-watched original to date and the first to put them in major awards contention. Bledel is no stranger to streaming success. Last year, Netflix brought back Gilmore Girls for a feverishly anticipated four-part revival, A Year In The Life, which was a huge hit but left many fans conflicted over the fate of Bledel’s Rory in particular. A listless drifter with no firm career path, the 32-year-old Rory felt like a far cry from the ambitious teenage bookworm of the series, who modeled herself on Christiane Amanpour and in the finale was heading off to report on Barack Obama’s campaign. “I think the intention was to set up some challenges for Rory that felt real, and show her struggling with actual issues within herself,” Bledel says diplomatically of the controversial arc. There may or may not be more Gilmore Girls—early reports suggesting a second Netflix season is in the works have been tempered by both Bledel and her co-star Lauren Graham—but from now on, Bledel may be getting the question less often. Rory Gilmore will remain her most beloved role, but Emily is already being rightfully hailed as the role she was born to play.
So, is Emily's story really over? With a second season of The Handmaid’s Tale officially on the way, Bledel is not ruling out a return. “I don’t know what happens to her after [Episode 5], but I definitely feel worried for her. I am encouraged by the fact that much of my storyline was either newly invented or enhanced from the book, so I think there’s certainly a possibility for more.”
Emma Dibdin
Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture, mental health, and true crime. She loves owls, hates cilantro, and can find the queer subtext in literally anything.
