Hulu has renewed The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian thriller series, for its fifth season, announced a spokesperson at the Walt Disney Investors Day on Thursday. The announcement comes ahead of the Emmy-award winning series’ Season 4 premiere, which has been pushed to 2021 after Covid-19 related shooting delays.
Cast members Elisabeth Moss, Samira Wiley, Yvonne Strahovski, Ann Dowd, and Max Minghella celebrated the renewal of the show through a video collage addressed to fans and posted on Twitter and YouTube on Friday. Calling it a “privilege and honour” to act in the series, they expressed elation that Season 5 had been “picked up”, and said they were currently still in Canada working on Season 4.
The Handmaid’s Tale is an Emmy-award winning series based on a novel by Margaret Atwood. It is set in the fictional Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian patriarchal state that has overthrown the United States in the near future. Elisabeth Moss stars as June Osborne, a woman enslaved in Gilead.
The show was nominated for 54 Primetime Emmy Awards through its first three seasons, and has won 15 awards thus far.
Season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale, wrapped up in August 2019 and the cast and crew began shooting for Season 4 in March 2020. However, due to the ongoing pandemic, like several other shows and movies, the production of Season 4 had to be halted as well.
Season 4 is currently slated for a 2021 release.
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The fourth season will feature 10 episodes. At the end of Season 3, Moss’ character Offred/June liberates several children from Gilead, becomes a fugitive, and gets gravely wounded in the process. The teaser of season 4 shows June saying “We’re just getting started” indicating that Seasons 4 and 5 will be packed with action and drama.
The series, produced by MGM Television and internationally distributed by MGM, stars Elisabeth Moss, Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Samira Wiley, Alexis Bledel, Ann Dowd, Max Minghella, Madeline Brewer, O-T Fagbenle, Amanda Brugel, Bradley Whitford, and Sam Jaeger.