Alanis Wheeler once looked at Serena Joy as her idol, but that adoration has slowly been crumbling over the course of The Handmaid’s Tale season 5. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with Genevieve Angelson about her approach to Alanis and the disintegration of Alanis and Serena’s relationship.
“There’s a moment when I’m leading her into my husband’s office to make a phone call, and she asks if I would like to stay in the room. I sort of turn to her and say, ‘No, I’m a wife.’ I kind of look at her and realize, wait, you’re supposed to be one, too. Why don’t these rules apply to you? I think that’s sort of what I continued to discover over the course of the season. She’s not practicing what she preaches,” Genevieve said.
She continued, “Not only is that highly disappointing, it’s highly dangerous because I actually think that what she preaches is essential to the continuation of humanity is the end of that sentence. In season 5 of this show, people sometimes seem to forget that the grounding premise of it is that there is a fertility crisis that threatens to extinct our species. So when people come up with solutions like Gilead, they’re saving the human race. When they break those solutions, they could be potentially threatening it. I think that the viewers having amnesia about that being what drives this story kind of makes people like Alanis a lot less empathetic, even though obviously she’s cast like a villainous character.”
The greenhouse scene between Alanis and Serena in episode 6 is the moment when things began to noticeably shift between them. Serena brings up being asked out by her gynecologist and says she might not even choose to get married again. Alanis is shocked and stresses that her baby needs a mother and a father. In a major power move, Alanis eventually orders Serena to go to her room.
“What I think is so important about the way that I chose to play Alanis which was inspired by the way that everyone on The Handmaid’s Tale chooses to play their character is that absolutely no one is playing a good guy or a bad guy. People are playing people,” Genevieve noted. “I felt very grounded when we played that scene. At one point I say something like, ‘Your baby needs a mother and a father, and that’s more important than your feelings.’ My whole argument to Serena Joy is grow up.”
The actress added, “I really shirk the characterization of Alanis as like villainous or creepy because I think she’s just very passionate about very dire circumstances. I think that scene that you’re referring to is sort of the last chance I’m giving her to not betray this image I have of her. I’m saying, listen, you could still get together with this doctor and settle down here. She proves to me in the course of that scene that she’s capable of making destructive decisions with her baby, but also the hope of humanity. So I can’t trust her, I’m giving her a chance, and she keeps just devastating me.”
For Alanis, the saying has proved true: don’t meet your heroes. In Alanis’ eyes, Serena has become the ultimate hypocrite of the society and values she helped create.
“I think that she’s discovering that the leader of the movement is not willing to be a member of the movement. But also, how hypocritical is that? I think Alanis’ whole argument is, yes, I understand that this violates your personal liberties. Yes, I understand that. Your personal liberties are not more important than the collective, and I think she’s valid,” Genevieve told HollywoodLife. “I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not crazy. Of course, I think Alanis is a villain, but I couldn’t play her that way. I couldn’t wake up in the morning and be like, ‘Okay, I’m going to work today to play the baddie.’ I wouldn’t have given a good performance. I had to be really specific about why I care as much as I do. That scene was very pivotal moment to moment dramatically laying out a final opportunity.”
Genevieve hasn’t gotten a full rundown of Alanis’ backstory, but she was able to flesh out her character with her wardrobe. “Once I went into my costume fitting, Leslie Kavanagh, the costume designer, and I really started kind of getting creative about who Alanis was and her backstory. So we were like, she’s pro-Gilead. She’s totally into all of that, but she just doesn’t understand why we have to do it with all the dreadful uniforms,” the actress quipped.
As for what’s ahead in the final episodes of season 5, Genevieve teased, “Alanis has to reconcile with the fact that her once idol and then complicated houseguest who she also wanted to protect is now a murderer. She has to reconcile with the fact that this person who was, at best, a hero, at medium, fertile, is now actually homicidal. How does she make sense of that and control that danger?” New episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale drop Wednesdays on Hulu.