‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 4: Elisabeth Moss Teases ‘Dramatic’ Changes

As fans await the premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 on Wednesday, April 28, series star Elisabeth Moss is teasing some “dramatic” changes to come in the upcoming season. The actress, who stars as lead character as June Osbourne/Offred, made an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Wednesday night, where she opened up about what viewers can expect when they tune into the new season later this month.

Joking that Season 4 of the Hulu original will contain “more laughs” and “cameos galore,” the actress also revealed that the new batch of episodes will “fulfill” what the show has built series has built throughout the first three seasons. Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, The Handmaid’s Tale is set in Gilead, a totalitarian society in a dystopian future where fertile women, “handmaids,” are subjected to child-bearing servitude. Throughout the first seasons, Moss’ onscreen counterpart has inched closer and closer to leading a rebellion, with Season 3 having ended with her helping nearly 100 children escape Gilead to Canada. Moss teased that the characters will also “change dramatically.”

“I do feel like we have built something over the past three seasons that quite rightly needs to be kind of fulfilled and I think that we do that this season, with Season 4, we kind of fulfill a lot of the promises that we’ve made over the last three years,” Moss said. “We really get to see not just June, but a lot of these characters really go to places they’ve never gone before and change dramatically. And it’s a huge season, which, of course, we choose to shoot during a pandemic.”

During Season 4, Moss will be pulling triple duty, not only starring and serving as one of the executive producers, but also making her directorial debut. While it was initially believed she would be directing a single episode, Moss revealed to Fallon that she is actually directing three episodes of the upcoming season, something that was due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I chose episode three that was going to be my directorial debut, before COVID, and started [filming] it,” she explained. “Then, we shut down for the six months, and then all of a sudden, I did that episode, I did two more—I did episodes eight and nine. Because nobody else was there a lot of the time, the directors. If a director finished their work and left, and they didn’t want to come back and quarantine for two weeks, somebody had to direct it. So all of a sudden, I was the director on hand… But by the end, we were joking that I was just going to be this journeyman director now, off to do my ninth episode of Law & Order, just clocking in and clocking out.”

The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 premieres on Wednesday, April 28 on Hulu, which you can sign up for with a free trial by clicking here. At that time, the first three episodes of the season – “Pigs,” “Nightshade,” and “The Crossing,” Moss’ directorial debut – will be available for streaming. New episodes will then premiere on a weekly basis.

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