Season 2 Casting News

This thread is for discussing new cast added to Handmaid's Tale

A new face for Season 2:

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Found a New Machiavellian Commander: Bradley Whitford

By LEX GOODMAN  FEB. 16, 2018 | 2:08 PM

JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX/GETTY IMAGES

Gilead is getting just what it needs for The Handmaid’s Tale’s second season: another brutish commander!

Bradley Whitford, who you might know from The West Wing and Transparent, is joining the oppressive dystopian society as a new character named Commander Joseph Lawrence. Oh, joy.

Commander Lawrence is the man in charge of Gilead’s economy and is said to give off some major disturbed-genius vibes (not unlike the other dudes portrayed in the Emmy-winning Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss). 
We can hardly wait to see Offred and friends on April 25. 

Pure Wow

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Blessed be. Following its Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning first season, Hulu's The Handmaid’s Tale has cast an integral character from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel for its upcoming sophomore cycle.

Emmy winner Cherry Jones (24) will guest-star as Holly, the feminist mother to June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) who, up until now, has only been mentioned in passing during flashback scenes. She will appear in episode three. Check out a first-look photo of her Handmaid's Tale appearance above. (As season two is still in production, it's unclear if Jones will return for more than one episode.)

Holly is described as an outspoken feminist and a judgmental but loving mother to June. In Atwood’s novel on which the MGM Television drama is based, Offred often reflects on her mother’s feminist causes and how, in the past, she found them to be extreme — an opinion that slowly shifts as the world of Gilead takes shape. In that version of the story, Holly’s precise present-day fate remains unclear to Offred, but she surfaces during a Handmaid’s training video shown to the girls at the center, hinting that she wound up in The Colonies where radiation probably killed her.

“We've been thinking about her a lot. June's mother is a big character in the book and representative of an interesting kind of feminism that was seemingly more of that time,” Miller told THR midway through the first season. “June's memories of her mother and her activism are very vibrant in the book, so we've been talking about her from day one of season one, and it just didn't seem like enough time to do her justice. In season two, we mention her a little bit, but we just don't want to short-shrift her story. It's a story we want to tell — she was one of the most memorable characters.”

Casting June’s mother was of utmost importance to Moss, who is also deeply involved in Handmaid's as an executive producer. The actress maintains that she had been asking about and pushing for casting on the role since the beginning, ultimately bringing Jones’ name to the table.

“She's a terrific literary character who’s now going to come to life for the first time, and so it was important to me who that was,” Moss tells THR. “I was obsessed with it for weeks and bothering everybody about it — way before anybody cared to talk about it. Cherry was my fantasy choice [for the part]. We sent her the script, she wrote a lovely email back and she said yes almost immediately.”

Hollywood Reporter

Daniel Chaudhry, 25, has landed a role in the highly anticipated second season of The Handmaid's Tale, opposite Emmy Award winning actress Elisabeth Moss. Chaudhry, the youngest of three children, got his first break voicing Black Phillip in 2015 horror The Witch. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and earned the Canadian a nomination for Best Villain at the Seattle Film Critics Awards. Following this, Chaudhry gained further exposure appearing in SyFy's hit series The Expanse, and he is currently working on producing a feature film.

The Media Eye