Handmaid's Tale Season 5 Actress Teases Janine's Story In Gilead

Madeleine Brewer, who plays Janine Lindo in the Hulu series The Handmaid's Tale, reveals that she will use even more of her 9 lives in season 5.

Handmaid's Tale Season 5 Actress Teases Janine's Story In Gilead

The Handmaid’s Tale star Madeleine Brewer reveals that her character’s journey will take her to even more dangerous places in season 5. The series, which was created by Bruce Miller for Hulu in 2017, is adapted and expanded from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian sci-fi novel of the same name. It follows June (Elisabeth Moss), one of the last fertile women in Gilead, formerly the East Coast of America, which has now become a fundamentalist state that forces women to bear children for the men in high society. As the series has progressed, June has helped mount a rebellion against the new status quo, though she has faced incredibly dangerous challenges along the way. The Handmaid’s Tale season 5 does not yet have a release date, but will likely come before the end of the year.

One of the major characters in the series is Janine Lindo, played by Brewer. The character, who has appeared on 32 of the show’s 46 episodes, is another Handmaid who was in the same training center as June. She begins her time in Gilead as one of the most rebellious Handmaids, but she is punished by having her right eye removed, and experiences a severe blow to her mental health. After she attempts to die by suicide toward the end of season 1 and is sentenced to death, the Handmaids’ refusal to stone her to death is one of their first major acts against the State. Eventually, Janine and June become allied once more, although they were separated in The Handmaid’s Tale season 4 and Janine was presumed dead until she was later revealed to have survived the Chicago bombings and taken back to Gilead.

Brewer spoke with EW about her role in The Handmaid’s Tale season 5. She describes her character as a “cat with nine lives,” which she will be using up even further in this “wild” upcoming season. She also says that this season, which takes place outside of Gilead for a considerable proportion, will see every character “going through a transformative period” that will reveal a new side of Janine. Read her full quote below:

As per usual, Janine is a cat with nine lives. And if you’ve been watching the show, you know she used up several of them already. And I’m going to just say this season is no exception to that. [We will also] see a side of Janine this season that we haven’t seen before.
The word wild is in my brain. It’s wild. It’s a little wild. I truly don’t know how to describe it… I mean, we’re so much out of Gilead. And everyone is experiencing things that they have not yet experienced. Everyone’s going through a transformative period. You know, everybody’s experiencing their Saturn return, okay? Right now all of these characters, their Saturn is returning.

Although Janine has had a rough go of it, she has been an instrumental ally to June in fomenting disruption in Gilead. Hopefully, that will continue to be the case even as she is forced to go through even more torment. The showrunner for the series has promised that The Handmaid’s Tale season 5 will be a test of faith for the revolution as their decisions begin to weigh on them, so Janine will likely face her greatest challenges yet. Seeing as she’s stuck with Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia in Gilead currently, her challenges are only set to get harder, but it’s possible she could act as an inside source for June as her own rebellion outside Gilead grows.

The Handmaid’s Tale and its characters have changed considerably since the series first premiered. However, the fight is far from over. Taking down a powerful nation takes a lot of time, and the Handmaids will have to make sure they have the resilience to see the revolution through. If there’s one word to describe Janine it’s resilient, but fans can only hope that the new side of her that is revealed is one that will be helpful to the cause.