As the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale begins on April 8, its events seem even more in conversation with the increasingly contentious North American reality.Crave/Supplied

Since it initially premiered during the first Donald Trump presidency in 2017, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale television series, inspired by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel set in the patriarchal Republic of Gilead, has always been discussed in relation to present American politics and rising authoritarianism globally.

Now, as the sixth and final season begins on April 8, its events seem even more in conversation with the increasingly contentious North American reality.

When we last left her, former handmaid June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) was living as a refugee in Canada – and had been fighting to recover her older daughter from across the border, while dealing with the trauma of her time spent in child-bearing enslavement. But growing anti-refugee sentiment and pro-Gilead extremism in Toronto had led her to board a train going west with her younger daughter, Nichole.

With series creator Bruce Miller working on a spinoff based on Atwood’s The Testaments, long-time writers and producers Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang took the reins as showrunners this season. The Globe and Mail’s J. Kelly Nestruck spoke to them over Zoom about filming the story’s conclusion in Toronto this fall and winter.

Can you tell me how much this season brings the story to a conclusion given there is a spinoff in the works?

Tuchman: We’ll bring most of our storylines to a very satisfying resolution. All the character arcs will be complete in this show, but there are some continuing storylines that will be picked up by The Testaments.

Is this season’s conclusion a place that you’ve always been moved toward – or has the overall arc of the series changed as you learn you get renewed?

Tuchman: The vibe and the pace have change over the course of the series. As June moved into Canada after she escaped, the momentum of the show started to pick up – and this season, especially, we wanted it to feel propulsive and to build and build over the course of the season so that we really peak by the end of this story.

Chang: The earlier seasons were more of an exploration of June’s trauma. While she was in Gilead, it was really June’s soldiering through, the fight to survive being in this horrible oppressive regime. Going into this season, we knew this was our very last chance to tell these stories – and we kind of joked that our stories caught up to our marketing. Every season the marketing was like, “You’re gonna get revolution, you’re gonna get the big fight.” This is it. We hope it is an inspiration during our dark times.

When we last left her, former handmaid June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) was living as a refugee in Canada.Crave/Supplied

People are always watching The Handmaid’s Tale as an allegory for what’s going on in the world at that moment it airs – but of course you’ve been working on this season for three years.

Tuchman: The writers’ room first got together in January of 2023, but then we had two separate strikes – the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild – which shut us down and then personal commitments of our cast that delayed the start of production. We didn’t start shooting until September of 2024. We wrapped the first week in February of 2025.

So, you finished shooting in Toronto by the time that the U.S.-Canada relationship had started to strain owing to the threats of annexation and tariffs.

Chang: I felt really bad as an American being up there. I just could not believe that our country was taking a hammer to this relationship. It’s weird because in our story, Canada has always been this place of a refuge. When I came back to the States, I was at a party and another American was saying to me: “I think the reason Trump wants to annex Canada is so that the Americans have nowhere to escape to.” That is exactly the role Canada played in our show.

I like the complexity that’s been introduced to that vision of Canada over the course of the series. We’ve seen this sort of anti-American refugee backlash emerge. It was surreal seeing, in the recap from the last season, Canadians out on the street with those red signs: “Canada United” and “Yankees go home.” One looks exactly like the Liberal Party’s current election posters – and there’s a viral Canadian Yankee Go, Home song on YouTube.

Chang: Once we had June in Canada, we wanted to show the reality of a place that would be flooded with Americans, right? Of course, as wonderful as the Canadians are, any country would start to get hostile to all these people coming in and taking advantage of your social services.

Tuchman: I’ve been on set for a couple of presidential elections. I was there in 2016, when it was a huge shock, the outcome of that election. And I was there again in this year. I remember on Inauguration Day that the Americans who were working up in Toronto on the show at that time, even if they were not on the job on that day, came to the set just to be together. We were not in our own country, feeling kind of isolated, and there was that need to feel solidarity with each other.

Some of the new season takes places in New Bethlehem – a settlement for Gilead refugees that’s a kind of compromise zone, a supposedly kinder, gentler version of the theocracy. What themes are you exploring there?

Chang: My family is from Taiwan, so I think a lot about China and Hong Kong. There’s China and how totalitarian is – but then there’s Hong Kong and they let more freedoms flourish when they first took it over. There’s always this threat that China will take over Taiwan too. So, the idea of an authoritarian regime with these little off-satellites that might have more freedoms is an idea that I wanted to test.

Everyone views this show through the prism of America, but how much do you look at authoritarian regimes around the world? Margaret Atwood has always said everything she put in the book existed somewhere before.

Tuchman: We have wonderful advisers on the show. We speak to people who are experts in the refugee community, people who are dealing with trauma in humanitarian crisis zones in the world.

Chang: I think a lot about those pictures of women in Iran and Afghanistan before, where they were in modern clothes and they had jobs and they could read. When I started on The Handmaid’s Tale, I had more rights as a woman than I do now. Whenever you write a TV show, you’re like: Could this feel real? You’re trying to make this seem as real as possible. Then it’s so strange, it’s like the real world is really selling it because it keeps coming closer to it feeling like it is possible.

The Handmaid’s Tale season six begins streaming on Crave April 8 with three episodes.