For months now, I’ve been marveling at the brilliance and foresight of Hulu. Last year, they greenlit a miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The book has already been made into a movie, but the miniseries promises to be a more complete adaptation of the dystopian classic. The miniseries stars Elisabeth Moss in the lead role, Offred, a “handmaid” in America’s dystopian future, which is represented as an oppressive theocracy where women have little to no rights. Offred is one of a minority of fertile women left in the country, and these handmaids are given to the rich, powerful and well-connected men so that those men can have offspring. It’s a story about feminism, about reproductive rights, and about how quickly women’s rights can be stripped away. The series debuts on April 26th on Hulu. Here’s one of the trailers:

Shiveringly good. The early reviews are amazing too, and Moss is already on many critics’ shortlists for #AllTheAwards. To promote the series, Atwood and Moss sat down for a discussion with Time Magazine – you can read the full Time piece here. Some highlights:

Atwood on the show not being specific to this moment in history: “The control of women and babies has been a part of every repressive regime in history. This has been happening all along. I don’t take it lightly when a politician says something like a pregnancy can’t result from a rape because a woman’s body knows it and rejects it. There’s an under­current of this [type of thinking]. And then it rises to the surface sometimes. But The Handmaid’s Tale is always relevant, just in different ways in different political contexts. Not that much has changed.

Moss on the reality of the story: “You’ve said a lot, and I’ve repeated often, that everything that happened in The Handmaid’s Tale has happened… And now we’re at a time when our climate is what it is in America and in the world… One of the things when we first started talking about making the show was whether this was something that could be plausible. I love it, but is this something the public is going to buy into? And then unfortunately, six months later, it became a hell of a lot more plausible.

Feminism & the roles Moss is drawn to: “A question I get asked a lot in inter­views: Do you gravitate toward feminist roles? This is a question I struggle to answer because I don’t necessarily feel like they are feminist roles. I feel like they’re interesting women. The Handmaid’s Tale is considered one of the great feminist novels. I actually consider it a human novel about human rights, not just women’s rights.

Atwood on women’s rights: Well, women’s rights are human rights unless you have decided that women aren’t human. So those are your choices. If women are human, then women’s rights are part of human rights… When we use that word, feminism, I always want to know: What do you mean by it? What are we talking about? If the person can describe what they mean by the word, then we can talk about whether I am one of those or not.

Atwood on the relevancy of the story: “We’re heading into a situation in which health coverage is going to be removed for pregnancy and childbirth. At the same time, you’re going to force women to have babies by making it so they can’t get abortions. That’s like being drafted into the army. Except at least in the army, you get three square meals a day and a place to sleep. You’re not left out on the street. If you’re going to take away women’s choice and not give them an adequate wage or healthcare, what would you call that? I’d call it a bad deal.

[From Time]

Just reading about this makes me wonder if the next time there’s a Women’s March, someone on the other side will find a way to link it to terrorism or something. That’s the next step – it’s obvious which powerful men hate women. Now all that’s left for them to do is find some way to brand all free-thinking women “terrorists.” And then it will be game over. Depressing, I know. But it’s how we need to think about things these days.

Photos courtesy of Hulu.