Yvonne Strahovski

The picture we keep from The Handmaid's Tale (2017) is not the red cloaks. It is Serena Joy Waterford at the head of the bed during the Ceremony, fully dressed, holding June's wrists with the steady grip of a nurse and looking at nothing in particular. We were horrified, and the horror came as much from her calm as from Elisabeth Moss's stare at the ceiling. That is the thing she does: the women she plays believe in what they are doing, and she never turns to the camera to tell us she does not.

She arrived in American television with Chuck (2007–2012), five seasons as Sarah Walker, a part that asked for fights, jokes and a romance, often in the same episode, and she made the three look like one job. Hannah McKay in Dexter (2012–2013) was a killer; Kate Morgan in 24: Live Another Day (2014) was a CIA agent with a gun. The films of the same years used her as the capable one at the edge of the frame: Killer Elite (2011) opposite Jason Statham, later The Predator (2018) and The Tomorrow War (2021). Television has done far better by her than cinema has, and it is not close.

Serena is where it all lands. Bruce Miller and his writers gave her more room each season to be clever, cruel and sorry inside a single exchange, and Strahovski took every inch of it. Serena helped build Gilead and now cannot leave the house without a man, and the performance never asks us to forgive that; it simply shows us a woman working out, a little at a time, what she has done to herself. Strahovski has said she tried very hard for the audience to have compassion for Serena and had her work cut out for her. She did. The compassion arrives anyway, usually at the moment Serena is being most unkind, which is the hardest way to earn it. Her American accent is so complete that the Sydney underneath never shows.

The caveat is the series around her. Over six seasons the show keeps hurting June and letting her up again, and the repetition dulls it. Strahovski keeps finding new corners of Serena to show us, but nobody stays fresh inside a loop, and there are stretches in the later seasons where she is asked to turn the same corner twice.

She has said she cannot help being drawn to the serious, dark material, and her choices since bear that out. We would not argue her out of it. We would only point out that the woman who was funny while pointing a gun in Chuck has not been allowed a joke in some time, and that whoever casts her next might remember she can do both.