Ever since its debut last month, Hulu’s smart and beautiful adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale has been landing a little harder with audiences than your average well-executed Peak TV project. The eerie political echoes in Margaret Atwood’s dystopia would be apparent no matter how the TV series unfolded, but the show wrings the most emotional juice out of elegant flashbacks that encourage viewers to reflect on how they—or any number of women they know—would handle such an erosion of civil liberties. We’d all like to think we’d resist, and much of the main cast of The Handmaid’s Tale reinforces that belief. It’s not hard to believe characters played by Elisabeth Moss or Samira Wiley—both of whom have resolutely endured indignities elsewhere in Peak TV-land—would keep on fighting. But while those casting choices are clever, the use of Gilmore Girls star Alexis Bledel as Ofglen is downright brilliant. Playing grittily against type, Bledel is The Handmaid’s Tale’s secret weapon—as she demonstrated most arrestingly in this week’s episode, “Faithful.”
When the cast members of the Hulu series gathered before the press for the first time at the Winter Television Critics Association tour in January, they were all giddily excited to share a project they were proud of. But there was one thing in particular that sent a ripple through the assembled actors: Bledel. Elisabeth Moss—who, let’s face it, has worked with some of the best television has to offer—admitted she was “blown away” by Bledel and promised that Handmaid’s would reveal a side of the Gilmore Girls actress that audiences had never seen before. What Bledel fans had seen in the past was a blue-eyed, Bambi-like charm that worked beautifully opposite the snap and crackle of Lauren Graham or when sharing magical pants with a group of friends or presenting an emotionally numb, 1960s sex fantasy on Mad Men. The most-famous previous example of Bledel trying to shake her rounded edges and doe-eyed persona, 2005’s Sin City. didn’t land convincingly. It was more like Rory Gilmore playing tough-girl dress-up.
But what a difference a decade makes. The Handmaid’s Tale knows exactly how to leverage Bledel’s gentler on-screen persona to devastating effect. When we first meet Ofglen, she’s stern and uptight—her mouth a hard line of suspicion. And director Reed Morano (who is rightly getting a lot of positive attention for helping to design the look of the series) knows exactly how to shoot the photogenic Bledel to the most devastating effect. In the recent Netflix reboot of Gilmore Girls, the 35-year-old actress looked as if she hadn’t aged a day since Rory ran off to campaign for Barack Obama. But under Morano’s camera’s gaze, every weary line and pore on Offglen’s face comes into focus. (These are lines I didn’t see on Bledel’s face myself when I sat across from her at the TCAs.) But as Moss likes to joke, Morano practically strapped her camera to the front of her actors' faces in order to get Handmaid’s unsettling close-ups. “Once you’re in the Bonnet, you’re kind of putting the audience in there with her in an uncomfortable way. But I think it’s effective,” Morano told me.
Those instantly-iconic Morano close-ups are expertly deployed on Bledel at the gut-wrenching end of Episode 3. After Ofglen reveals herself to Moss’s character, Offred, as containing hidden depths, a sexual preference for women, and an angry, rebellious spirit, Bledel’s character is captured and punished for, among other things, her gayness. In one of the show’s most horrifying sequences, Ofglen wakes up in a hospital bed to find her genitals have been mutilated. That’s right: The Handmaid’s Tale reserves its ugliest, most woman-hating punishment for poor Rory Gilmore.
Bledel’s absence from the show’s flashback sequences (which are all told from Offred’s perspective) almost allows audiences to think of Ofglen as a dark, taciturn future version of the bright and loquacious Rory. We know what Offred and Wiley’s character, Moira, looked like before Gilead stole their freedom. But for Ofglen, other than a bookish (hey!) career and a wife and kid, her past is a blank to us. And if we do, even subconsciously, imagine Ofglen as Rory, then, as Bledel puts it, we’re following her from the utopia of Stars Hollow to the dystopia of Gilead. The dystopian Handmaid’s Tale requires much more nuance and depth than Bledel has ever been asked to muster on-screen. And she’s up for the task.
“I have to pinch myself,” Bledel told me back in January of getting to play Ofglen. “This was an incredible opportunity for me play a really complex character, and that is both fascinating and terrifying. I can't believe I got to do it.” Bledel sounded like an actress who has been typecast for much of her career—not ungrateful for the past work she’s gotten but hungry for the challenge of more and complicated things to do.
Spoilers for Episode 5 to follow: whether those complications come in the form of future seasons of the recently renewed Handmaid’s Tale is unclear. When last we see Ofglen, she’s being dragged away by guards after briefly stealing a car and killing a man. The character meets an untimely end in the books, and after her last blockbuster scene in this week’s installment, it’s not hard to assume the same awaits her on the series. Bledel also stopped filming back in November, long before the rest of the crew—so this episode is likely her last appearance in Season 1.
Still, The Handmaid’s Tale stopped short of assassinating Ofglen (or shall we call her “Emily”?) on-screen, leaving her future in the series unclear. (“I actually don’t know for sure,” Bledel told the A.V. Club of her possible return to the show. “But I believe that there will be more. But I don’t know what happens to her. I haven’t been told.”) And the Hulu series has already taken a number of liberties with the books, so a return for Bledel doesn’t seem out of the question.
If this is the last time we see Oflgen, however, The Handmaid’s Tale gave Bledel a brilliant send-off. In her desperate marketplace escape, Bledel makes eloquent use of her wide blue eyes in a largely dialogue-less action scene. She’s less Bambi here and more trapped bird, one who melts with relief once she knows she’s probably taken her violent rebellion too far. In the books Ofglen kills herself; in the show she might as well have.
Whatever Bledel’s future on the show may be, though, her performance in Season 1—brief as it is—gets under the skin in a way even a powerhouse like Moss might not be able to. Peggy Olson or Detective Robin Griffin would absolutely fight back against a dystopian, misogynist future. But Rory Gilmore not letting the bastards grind her down? That’s the stuff resistances are made of.
