Max Minghella also spoke about Nick's new wife and his relationship with June.

The Handmaid's Tale has returned for its fifth season and things will never be the same again for its cast of characters. Last season focused on June (Elisabeth Moss) and Janine (Madeline Brewer) escaping Gilead, which was fraught with disaster and fresh horrors. Eventually, June was able to seek asylum in Canada, but Janine was taken back to the Republic of Gilead, where she was placed back under the watchful eye of Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd). The season took a bloody turn in its final act, which saw Nick (Max Minghella) help June orchestrate a magnificent act of vengeance against Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) by helping her and other handmaids who had suffered unspeakable abuse in Gilead, chase Fred down and murder him in a forest in No Man's Land. The new season picks up mere hours after that fateful night, and sets the stages for new anxiety-churning drama for its cast of characters as they navigate tenuous freedom in Canada and the eerie evolution occurring within Gilead under the leadership of Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford).

In an interview ahead of The Handmaid's Tale's 2-episode Season 5 premiere, Collider chatted with Max Minghella and Bradley Whitford about Gilead's slow transformation, Nick's relationship with his new wife, the figurative chess game that everyone is playing with each other in the wake of Fred's death, and Minghella's on-screen connection with Elisabeth Moss' June.

COLLIDER: I want to start with Max at the end of season four. We learned that Nick has gotten married and in season five, we get to see a little bit of his relationship with his wife. What has it been like for you, getting to explore this new phase of Nick's life? And is there a real love there?

MAX MINGHELLA: Nick's not very good at marriage. That's what I'm learning. Not his strong point. Another complicated marriage for Nick in quick succession. I think there's so much in the first interaction you see between Nick and Rose in the show. There's so much off-screen information that we're getting in terms of what their dynamic must be, how much they must share between one another. And it's clear, I think to me, from the outset that there's real trust between them. And I think that he trusts Rose in a way we haven't really seen him trust anybody outside of June in this show. So it's obviously a meaningful relationship. It does strike me as maybe more strategic, or a marriage of convenience, perhaps more than a romantic [relationship]. That could be-

BRADLEY WHITFORD: I think the logline for this year, I don't know, really should be that Gilead is for lovers.

You say that, and I'm calling in here from Virginia, which is Virginia is for lovers. So if that's the tagline for Handmaid's Tale, that makes sense.

WHITFORD: It's very similar to Virginia.

Bradley, at the beginning of the season, the center point is Fred's funeral and all of this. And Commander Lawrence is really championing this for Serena, when a lot of the other guys in Gilead aren't really interested in it. What is his endgame here? What is he hoping to achieve by publicizing Fred's funeral?

WHITFORD: It's really interesting. I think it's another example of Lawrence being led by the women. I think initially, he thinks it's an absolutely crazy idea. And then I think he thinks Serena has a brilliant intuition about an event that could end up lifting Lawrence and lifting Gilead. But I think there's an actual moment, I think he's absolutely genuine when he initially thinks it's a bad idea. And then I haven't seen the episode, but I hope that there's a sense of him realizing, "Oh wow. Yeah. That's a very interesting idea." And for my purposes, it moves us right past the questions about Fred's murder. It moves us just beyond it immediately. So I think there's strategic reasons, but I think he's impressed that she comes up with this.

Speaking to Fred's murder. It's really interesting. That whole episode is interesting because obviously Nick knows what happens to Fred. Serena knows that June knows that Serena probably thinks that Nick probably knows. And Max, I was wondering, what is it like to play with those layers of deception? Because everyone is playing a game. Everyone has their own plans that's happening in that episode.

MINGHELLA: I think it's one of the great joys of doing this show is the space in between. Bradley often said the scripts are lying, that people are, as in life, people often say the antithesis of how they actually feel. So I really enjoy that. I've always enjoyed that in the show. I think particularly for me this year and a little bit last year, getting to work more with Brad, who I obviously admire so much, but I think someone who is brilliant at interrogating and mining those spaces. It makes it all the more good fun.

WHITFORD: Just to add, I think Max is right. There is a particular joy on this show because of the spaces, because of the paranoia. Lizzy and I have talked about it. The term that we use is sort of swimming in the weird. There's a lot of subtexts going on

Going off of that and the subtext of all of that, Commander Lawrence is definitely one of the more sane men in Gilead, and he has really big plans for Gilead in the season particularly. Do you think that paints a target on his back at all among the other men in Gilead?

WHITFORD: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that there's an abandon to him in the wake of the death of Eleanor that continues in this season. And I think that June has shown a pretty dark guy what he thinks is a potential path to redemption in some ways. I think you'll see it comes into conflict with what June thinks can be done and should be done, which I think Lawrence thinks might be a little naive at this point. But yeah. It's so interesting. I brought this dangerous girl into my home, this notoriously misbehaving handmaid, and then I have gone way out on a limb, whether it's Angels Flight or Fred's murder. I think he's always in a very dangerous spot.

So my last question is for Max. It always feels so weird to say that Nick and June are one of my favorite aspects of the show because there is so much more than that relationship. I was really curious to know how you and Elisabeth keep it grounded, keep that connection, and maybe where you see that relationship going, especially now with these new complications.

MINGHELLA: I don't know where it's going. I really don't. We don't know what's going to happen on the show. So there is this kind of, much like life, this kind of mystery of what will come next. I love working with her. I love doing those scenes. It is a thrill. It's a thrill to get to work with somebody [who is] that good. And to play off this very heightened ... And I think in a show that has very dense ideas and is very intellectual and heavy, it's fun to do some stuff that feels ... What's the word I'm looking for, Brad? It's a little bit heightened. It's a little bit more-

WHITFORD: Yeah. It's a very interesting situation, and it's just too bad that you guys don't have any chemistry on screen. Imagine.

MINGHELLA: Lizzie and I ... I saw her last night, and we were saying, we never met before we did the show. None of us had met before we did the show. She never met [them] before she did the show. And it is a miracle that there is some kind of onscreen connection. It's fantastic. Because who knows? It could go terribly wrong.

WHITFORD: Yes. As an old man who's done this for a long time, this show is one of those miracles of alchemy on many different levels, and it's a miracle when it happens. You can set out to do it, but it could be very elusive.

MINGHELLA: I do feel like the chemistry between Lawrence and Nick may start to rival the June-

WHITFORD: It's pretty intense.

MINGHELLA: It's pretty intense. There's a lot happening there.

The new season of The Handmaid's Tale is streaming now on Hulu.

Maggie Lovitt is the Lead News Editor at Collider and a lover of all things related to pop culture. In addition to reporting on the latest entertainment news, she is also an actor and member of the Screen Actors Guild based out of the Mid-Atlantic Region. She is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, a member of the Hollywood Critics Association, Screen Actors Guild, and The Cherry Picks. She has a special taste for horror films that make you think, rom-coms that dole out a healthy dose of Fremdschämen, high-flying action flicks that deliver hits, and has an enemies-to-lovers relationship with superhero movies. In 2020, she co-founded the podcast “Petticoats & Poppies: History Girls at the Movies” with her longtime friend, and North Carolina-based film critic, Nicole Ackman. That same year, Maggie joined as a co-host on the Star Wars podcast ‘Outer Rim Beacon,’ and has appeared as a guest on numerous Star Wars podcasts and other pop culture podcasts. In 2021, she launched “Starbucks Lovers: A Taylor Swift Podcast” which allows her to geek out about her love for Taylor Swift and music. She also runs Millennial Falcon Reviews (@mfalconreviews). While she spends her time writing and editing articles about the entertainment industry, Maggie’s background is in history and anthropology. She earned her Bachelor’s in Historic Preservation from the University of Mary Washington, where she focused on Colonial American history, British literature, and historic architecture. She recently earned her Master’s in Engaged Anthropology at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, where she focused her studies on dark tourism, magic, and the politics of food.

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