(Spoiler: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen “Other Women,” the fourth episode of Season 2 of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”)
June (Elisabeth Moss) may be the heroine of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but she’s no saint.
Before our leading lady and her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) had an almost perfect life with their little girl Hannah — pre-Gilead, that is — he was married to another woman. We first learned this in Season 1, seeing in flashbacks how the pair fell in love and had an affair while Luke was still with his first wife.
But Wednesday’s episode of the Hulu series second season, entitled “Other Women,” delved deeper into that backstory and didn’t shy away from the reality of the hurt the couple inflicted on Luke’s former spouse, Annie. And Fagbenle told TheWrap that was actually a good thing.
“I really love that storyline, to be honest,” Fagbenle said. “Because I think, so often, it’s so easy to kind of idolize people and to put them on some kind of pedestal, and then when you find out you’re ‘gods of clay feet,’ as they say, it can be devastating. And I think it’s really important that we kind of like, relate to characters who are real.”
“We have flaws, things go wrong, people’s hearts get broken, people make mistakes, people fall in love with other people,” Fagbenle continued. “And that’s hard, but that’s also part of life. And it shouldn’t stop us kind of from empathizing and loving people. And so I was really glad that we got to explore that, ’cause it kind of, in a way, humanized this special love that I think Luke and June have.”
Watch Fagbenle’s interview above and check back at TheWrap next Wednesday at 10:10 am PT for a new interview with another “Handmaid’s Tale” star about Episode 5.
New episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale” stream Wednesdays on Hulu.