Bradley Whitford Is The Handmaid's Tale's Greatest Mystery
For those bearing witness to the horrors of Gilead, it may seem necessary, for self-preservation, to assign the people pulling its strings to the column labeled "evil."
Then there’s Commander Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford). He's one of Gilead's founding fathers, yet his role in arranging Nichole's escape is the reason June (Elisabeth Moss) chose to stay behind, to join the Resistance, and cling to hope. But Lawrence takes pleasure in confusing those around him, pivoting between wry banter with June, newly assigned to his home as Handmaid, and barking orders at cowering Marthas. In private, he permits June to harbor fugitives in his basement; in public, he toys with her intelligence for an audience of leering Commanders. Then there’s his emotionally damaged wife Eleanor (Julie Dretzin), to whom he channels unconditional compassion.
Only Whitford-he The West Wing and Get Out fame-could perform this precise dance between sardonic humor, chilling indifference, and tender affection. For the former, Whitford played Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman, the wily scamp with a bleeding heart of gold in Aaron Sorkin's legendary early-aughts White House drama. In the latter, Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning directorial debut, Whitford's character entered the zeitgeist with his famous proclamation, "I would've voted for Obama a third time if I could.” That line-directed to his daughter's black boyfriend before he tries to harvest his body as a vessel for aging white people's brains-became a viral sensation, a touchstone for the hypocrisy inherent in white liberalism. But Whitford considers Commander Lawrence his most rewarding acting challenge of all.
"There was something very surprising to me in the early scenes-this overwhelming, painful, exhilarating feeling that June sees him and challenges him," Whitford tells BAZAAR.com. “This guy hasn't been seen or challenged in a long time. In his patriarchal condescension, he's not expecting that. It’s an overwhelming flick of a gyroscope. There are moments when he gets defensive, but he's open to it.”
June’s arrival in Commander Lawrence’s household coincides with his own internal reckoning, and she’s shrewd enough to take advantage of it. She presses him on the pitfalls of Gilead, and he engages with her. “His humanity is peeking out, and she’s luring it out. But it'll get too far out and he will lash back,” Whitford explains. “In his mind it's like, ‘You think I'm not aware of the brutality of this? This is chemo. I saved the world. You're welcome.’” Commander Lawrence entertains June, Whitford says, because “he’s intrigued by [the Resistance’s] strength and bravery and it's resonating with an impatience that is building up in him. Intellectually, he's sticking his fingers in the fan.” There’s also Eleanor, his weakness and potential path to redemption. “Because of his wife, he is understanding part of the consequences of what he's done,” Whitford says, with a caveat: “On the one hand, it's really nice that that's able to open him up. But it's a really pathetic statement that until the suffering comes to your house, you can't imagine it.”
Episode 5 sees Lawrence's humanity continue to surface. When Eleanor tries to comfort June, the conversation turns to painful reflection, with Mrs. Lawrence longing for the man who courted her with mix tapes decades ago. Later, June spies the couple bonding over the music, freshly unearthed from a moldy box in the basement. Don't read too much into the Commander's apparent thawing, though. Whitford claims he doesn’t know Lawrence's endgame, and he prefers it that way. “Giving her [June] a realistic and complicated obstacle is really important," he says. “That unpredictability does justice to what everybody on this show [feels]. You want to do it right. This does not feel like a regular job because of the particular resonance of this story and the urgency of it.”
The Handmaid’s Tale, despite its source material entering the world in 1985, is more relevant than ever under the Trump administration. In Washington, D.C., women are marching on Capitol Hill decked out in red Handmaids’ robes to protest laws restricting their reproductive rights. To Whitford, a longtime liberal and political activist, that makes his role on the show-and his personal responsibility to the material-even more impactful. “As a man I'm always conscious of the fact that my voice tends to be heard in a different way than a woman's,” he says. Of the recent legislation passed to restrict abortion in states across the U.S., he declares, “I am amazed that people aren't more outspoken about this. I think that everybody has an obligation to speak out about it.”
He adds his own frustration about gender politics swallowing the forthcoming presidential election. “It's amazing to me that there's all this talk among my friends [right now] of, ‘Can a woman... do we want to risk this moment?’ I understand the concern. It's an existential election and we have to win it,” he acknowledges. “But after John Kerry lost, nobody said, ‘We just can't risk running another man.’ And the way Hillary is interpreted to this day, there's segments on CNN: ‘Should Hillary be quiet?’ Why are we having that discussion? Are we telling Bernie he should be quiet? No, of course not.”
When it comes to getting into the head of Commander Lawrence, a character whose beliefs are antithetical to Whitford’s, the actor admits to exercising caution. “I am constantly conscious of the danger of overly sympathizing, [or] undercutting the difficulty of this character with some sort of judgment,” he says. “It’s very bizarre when you're shooting a scene with women in cages and in the news we're talking about children and women in cages. It feels very painful.” He professes his admiration for Elisabeth Moss, his former West Wing co-star and current Handmaid’s Tale colleague. “Lizzie sets a tone which is joyously creative and loving and uncomplicated. It allows you to create a safe space where you can deal with such dark, unfortunately increasingly relevant material.”
The exchanges between Lawrence and June offer the most engaging, amusing sequences of the season. Whitford and Moss slip into a playful repartee that often induces laughter despite the show's grim tone. Whitford confesses he’s a bit of a fan boy (“I think Lizzie is giving the performance of a generation”) but it goes deeper than that. “It sounds really pretentious, but I find this guy in her eyes,” he says. “To be able to do it with Lizzie, I feel like there is an unspoken, ‘Fuck it. Let's see where this goes,’ when ‘Action’ happens. We don't want to know where it's gonna go, we don't want to execute a predetermined performance. With a character like this, it's a constant reminder to go wherever the moment takes you.”
So, with eight episodes to go in the season, what can we expect from the Lawrence-June relationship? Whitford, wary of spoilers, demurs until I promise not to publish anything damning. He sighs. “June takes him-under appalling circumstances-a lot farther that he would ever imagine he could go.” He pauses, thoughtful, then adds, “The musical number at the end is hilarious.”
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