Max Minghella Nick's death and ended the show

Spoiler alarm: This story contains spoilers for “Execution”, season 6, episode 9 of “The Handmaid's Tale”, which is now streaming on Hulu.

Nick Blaine from Max Minghella is no longer.

Towards the end of the penultimate episode of “The Handmaid's Tale”, a relatively simple piece of sabotage for Bradley Whitfords Turncoat Commander Joseph Lawrence became a suicide mission. He was forced to get a only commander flight with an explosive device that he had hoped for before the others entered the plane before the others arrived, but as a Commander Wharton (Josh Charles) Lawrence, he had no choice but to join them. It was not aware of what she was expecting, Nick, who spent his last moments in the air in the air, asked Lawrence whether June was okay, and then remembered that she had often told him that he should leave Gilead behind him.

Nick was right to be concerned. Previously, Nick, whose annoying love affair with Elisabeth Moss' protagonist June of the show made her central, bad romance available, had finally brought her to freedom-after she had already exposed Junis plans to Commander Wharton, Nick's Archskaner-Pacitor.

During the course of the series, Nicks have fluctuations between the attempt to help June and a persistent loyalty to the theocracy that she sits down for a complicated drumbeat under the action and politics of the show: he is loyal, unless his loyalty to the state and the strong men who lead it.

All of this was brought to life by Minghella, a former Emmy candidate for the role and even a filmmaker. (“Shell”, a film that he staged with Elisabeth Moss, played the Toronto International Film Festival last autumn.) diversity From a film that plays in Wales, Minghella illuminated his thoughts on the complicated loyalities in Nick and what connects this radicalized young man to our current political moment.

What did it mean for you that he was discussing and thinking about June in Nick's last moments?

It felt very moving – and in harmony with the character and how it worked on the show. He was really driven by this relationship. It was also nice to end with Bradley, who has become such a friend outside the show. That also felt right for me.

It is interesting that their character and Bradley's June discuss because Nick and June had such a broken love story throughout the series – they had a real feeling for each other, but everything was structured and distorted by the crazy political situation around them. In many ways, they were disagreed until the end.

I don't even know if it was the original intention. Lizzie and I didn't know each other before we started with this show. We were relieved to discover that we not only had a common chemistry on the screen, but were also connected as a creative partner. So that was probably reflected in the story. I was always looking forward to her scenes and I think she did it too.

I imagine that over time, the authors started to write about the chemistry and relationship that they have shared both of them.

I don't know the answer. I was not always aware of the inner layers of “The Handmaid's Tale”, mainly out of confidence in the writing team and the creative guidance of the show. It was wonderful not to have to think too much about this kind of decisions.

I find the character of Nick very moving because – and I hope it doesn't insult it – it is fundamentally weak. And so it is very easily led by strong male figures, just as he is involved in Gilead first and what always pulls him back to his leadership. Was it difficult to play someone who is slippery and undecided?

That has been there since the first season. We do not tend to know a large amount of the background history of the characters on this show, but in the first season we were offered small flashbacks of who was each of these people before everything happened. In the case of Nick, in a short time you really get a clear feeling for who he was and how his combination of a lack of education and clearly an abusive upbringing has led to his father's figures that appear in the course of history.

For this reason I found a really clever piece of casting, and Josh and I talked a lot about it. They see a lot of it in the real world: I think that young men who are fundamentalized or can easily be misled, often look for a strong male model that they may lack in any way. So I found that pretty clever. And I thought that Wharton was the worst man we had in Gilead, and yet he is probably the self -obsessed and self -confident. While it is a very malignant character, I think that there is a security that misleads Nick.

Do you know the so-called “manosphere” this alternative media landscape, in which podcasters and content creators share the legal ideas about what it means to be a strong man?

I am not aware of it. I saw this show “adolescence” and I think she touches some of the things you are talking about. This is probably not the answer you hope, but what I always found so interesting about “The Handmaid's Tale” is that it is a text from 1985, right? And it is quite timeless in the topics and ideas it explores. The show had a kind of classic bent, and I always relied on it – it is as permeated in real history as in classic literature. And I always enjoyed the melodramatic arches of the show. It is not afraid of the opera elements in history.

I think what they say has to do with what Margaret Atwood said this novel is not about today's America, since it can indicate scenarios in the course of the history of misogyny and abuse.

We are guilty of thinking that something new is when it is actually cyclical in our history. We often think that some of the ideas we deal with for the first time when they come back in eternity.

When one speaks of the archetypal aspects of Nick himself, the same weakness that we have discussed brings it low. At the beginning of the season, after promised until June, he would finally break with Gilead and moved to Paris with her, it became known that he had revealed her plans to Commander Wharton. Were you surprised and read it in the script for the first time?

It wasn't as if I discovered the information when I read it. Lizzie and I spoke to another project before this season. For the first time I was pretty inaugurated in the direction of the character [before receiving scripts].

I was very surprised by transparent where they wanted to take Nick in season 6 because it was very different from what he previously served the show. Not to get to macro about it, but the relationship between Nick and June was an exhaustion of the more tense thematic elements of the show. And so to justify this relationship with some of the darker, nihilistic points of view that we have to research in “The Handmaid's Tale”, I was a surprised man as an actor. And certainly nobody could accuse her of the Panderering.

I don't know that I would have played everything in the past if I knew we wanted to land there. But that's probably just a naivety on my side, so I wouldn't say that there was a shock. I found it just an interesting and courageous decision.

I would agree that it is not a last season that pulls the blows.

It is really difficult to end a show. I am not jealous of someone who is responsible for it. But when I have seen many episodes lately, I found it extremely satisfactory to see again – on a visceral, emotional level – revenge, which was delivered in a satisfactory way. And I hope that the audience will not only enjoy the dense aspects of the show, but also the emotional retaliation.

This interview was processed and compressed.