17 things you probably didn't know about 'The Handmaid's Tale'

The series has been a massive success, but Margaret Atwood's novel has been seen and heard in many forms before.

It was previously adapted into a film in 1990, an opera in 2000, radio dramatizations in 2000 and 2002, a ballet in 2013, and several theater productions around the world, to name a few.

A graphic-novel adaptation also hit shelves in March 2019.

In a 2019 interview with Us Weekly, showrunner Bruce Miller revealed that Offred's decision to stay in Gilead at the end of season two divided the writer's room and initially angered him.

"It was an argument we had in the writers' room for four months," he said in response to viewer reactions.

He continued, "She's coming back with an active, positive agenda. She wants to do something. You don't stay back not to do something."

In the same Us Weekly interview, Miller said that the first episode of season three starts about "14 seconds" after the season-two finale.

The show is set in a near-future New England (specifically Massachusetts) after the collapse of the United States, but the production of the show has largely taken place in Toronto and in other locations around Ontario, Canada.

Atwood is also a Canadian author.

According to a 2018 article Atwood wrote for Lit Hub, the book was originally titled "Offred," after its main character. But around 150 pages in, the author said she changed it to "The Handmaid's Tale."

Per an essay the author wrote for The New York Times in 2017, the new title is an allusion to Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales."

In the book, Offred's name prior to the coup and establishment of Gilead is only hinted at but never explicitly written.

In the same New York Times essay, Atwood explained her decision.

"So many people throughout history have had their names changed, or have simply disappeared from view. Some have deduced that Offred's real name is June, since, of all the names whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium/dormitory, 'June' is the only one that never appears again," she said. "That was not my original thought but it fits, so readers are welcome to it if they wish."

On the show, each Handmaid is given an ear tag with an ID number.

June's tag number is 1985, which was the year Atwood's book was originally published.

During a 2018 interview on "Mayday: The Handmaid's Tale Podcast," Miller spoke about the occasional disconnect between what fans get from the show and what the production team intended.

For example, he pointed out the season-two episode of the show where there's a flashback of Serena Joy getting shot during a protest.

Many fans jumped to the conclusion that the bullet struck her reproductive organs, explaining her infertility, but Miller confirmed on the podcast that the character was infertile prior to the incident like the other women in the society.

On the show, there are Black handmaids, but in Atwood's book, all non-Caucasian citizens are segregated and taken to a place in the Midwest called the National Homelands.

The character Moira, played on the show by Samira Wiley, is from the book, but she was originally written as a white woman, which explains why she wasn't segregated.

There also weren't any gay characters in the book, but Atwood told Vanity Fair in 2017 that she was excited about Ofglen being a lesbian on the series.

"It's very 'now,'" she said. "In the book, we don't hear too much about [Ofglen]. In the series, she's, number one: gay, [and] number two: she had a wife. You couldn't have said that in 1985."

The official shade is Pantone 202 CP, but costume designer Ann Crabtree dubbed it "lifeblood," according to Vulture.

According to the book "The Art of Making of The Handmaid's Tale" the teal fabric Crabtree used to make the costumes for the Wives was discontinued at some point during the first season.

The designer found a way to use that to the show's advantage, making it so that the different colors signified "who had the power at any given moment, with the most teal fabric going to those in favor and others getting material that's greener or more faded."

Actress Amanda Brugel has been analyzing the themes of "The Handmaid's Tale" since she was a teen.

In a 2018 interview with OK! magazine, she said that she read Atwood's book when she was 15 years old and wrote short stories about the dystopian world.

She even went on to write her college thesis about Rita, the character she went on to portray on the hit show.

Atwood served as a consulting producer on the first two seasons of the show, and she even made a cameo on the series' pilot episode.

The author played the aunt who slapped Offred for her disobedience.

Season-two production designer Elisabeth Williams said that when she and the rest of the team were developing the aesthetic for The Colonies, they looked to art and world history.

"In terms of color in The Colonies, it was also important that we have these golds and amber colors, and light blues," she told Deadline in 2018. "It's very reminiscent of Dutch paintings, and yet you have these dying women working the soil and basically killing themselves to better Gilead."

Williams researched different environmental disasters and was inspired by images of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster where garbage bags of contaminated soil had formed unnatural mountains.

Domes were also added to give a "lunar feeling" to the landscape.

In a 2018 interview with Variety, composer Adam Taylor said that he's consulted Elisabeth Moss about some of the music that goes into the show.

"I had a note on a music cue, and I ended up writing him this long email that wasn't about music, but just telling him what I felt the scene was about for me, describing what my character was feeling and what I wanted the scene to say," Moss told Variety.

Taylor came back with the perfect guitar cue, and their collaboration was born.

"I never tell him what to do in musical terms, because he's the genius and knows that far better than me," Moss said. "I only speak in the terms that I know, the emotions and thoughts of my character and what's going on in the scene. And then he takes it from there and does something that is better than I ever could have imagined."

Since the show's premiere, women have used the iconic handmaid uniform as a symbol of dissent at protests.

"In a weird, twisted way, it makes sense," Crabtree said, per the Radio Times. "Women are saying: this was used as a means of controlling women by the patriarchy. We are going to completely twist that around and re-use it."

Although Netflix vied for the award with shows like "Orange Is the New Black" and "House of Cards," Hulu became the first streaming service to take home the Emmy for outstanding drama for its original series.