JUNE discovering that some handmaids had their mouths brutally sewn shut was one of the most shocking moments in The Handmaid’s Tale’s third season.
The Channel 4 drama saw June (Elisabeth Moss) travel to Washington DC, where she found that the handmaids were stopped from speaking after being fitted with mouth rings.
And show boss Bruce Miller told Business Insider that the rings were initially put on by the handmaids themselves as part of a protest that backfired on them,
“That’s how these things start, they’re voluntary, then they’re encouraged, then they’re required,” he explained.
“It was my idea to put it in the show. It was an extrapolation of the enforced silence, which is the idea that handmaids are told to be quiet, and they’re forced to be quiet.”
Bruce added: “It’s the most horrible looking appliance, and the most horrible, shocking image for me. It was just terrible.”
Meanwhile, the show’s head costume designer Natalie Bronfman believes the mouth rings had such an impact because of where they are positioned on the body.
Speaking to The Express, she said:It sits just beneath the nose mostly because your nose and your nostrils are actually extremely expressive, not just your eyes.
“For example when you look at someone and you see they’re angry, what’s the thing that happens? Their nostrils flare. So that’s why it’s just the mouth covered.”
She continued: “I had to come up with something that was expressive yet looked medieval really and oppressive.”
And during fittings for the mouth rings, Natalie says the actors actually couldn’t speak.
Oddly enough, as soon as we were making the prototypes for that, we tried them on different people to tweak.
“And all the girls in the shop when they put it on, they said it’s immediately it makes you stop chatting.
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“You just don’t talk any more because it’s so tight and it is covering your mouth.”
The Handmaid’s Tale has been renewed for a fourth season and will return to screens in 2020.
Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, The Testaments, which is a sequel to the dystopian tale, will also be adapted into a series by US streaming service Hulu.
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