The Handmaid’s Tale is almost back — and Hulu just released the first official look at the sixth and final season.
Stills from the upcoming season were released on Tuesday, November 12, and one showed June (Elisabeth Moss) smiling at the camera, which parallels the smirk she gave during the season 5 finale. The season came to an end with June and Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) running into each other on the same train of Gilead refugees headed to Vancouver before trying to settle in Hawaii.
“It’s actually a pretty positive ending for the show and the season, which we don’t usually do. It’s a cliffhanger,” Moss, 42, told The Hollywood Reporter in November 2022 of the finale. “But there’s something positive about it. Of course, of all the people that would be on the train is this person who is her other half, the other half of this experience.”
Disney also released a sneak peek video teasing TV shows coming out in 2025. Footage from The Handmaid’s Tale showed Serena, who said, “Something big is about to happen.” In response, June noted that they should “bring them home.”
The hit Hulu series, which premiered in 2017, is based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name about a dystopian future. Due to low fertility rates, women were assigned to men for bearing children after a second American Civil War.
Moss, Strahovski, Madeline Brewer, Ann Dowd, O-T Fagbenle, Max Minghella and Samira Wiley have starred on the show since its debut. Over the years, the show also became a critical success when it became the first show produced by Hulu to win a major award and the first series on a streaming network to win an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.
Hulu has already confirmed that season 6, which is set to be released in 2025, is the show’s last. The universe is expanding, though, with an adaptation of Atwood’s 2019 novel The Testaments. It was previously announced that Hulu and MGM were developing the sequel series, but there hasn’t been any more news yet.
Before season 6 started filming earlier this year, The Handmaid’s Tale faced a shakeup when Bruce Miller stepped down as showrunner after being with the series since the beginning. He remains a writer and executive producer but passed on his duties to executive producers Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang.
“We are ending our show on our own creative terms,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2022 before his departure. “Do I know what happens in season 6? Yes, I did think about the stuff that happens in season 6 for a while.”
The Handmaid’s Tale is currently streaming on Hulu.