The Handmaid's Tale - Emily [Alexis Bledel] #1: The Secret Weapon. - Page 2

la villanelle · 06-03-2017, 10:28 AM

I wanted to be Rory growing up. So I definitely liked her then. But with this shes got more to offer

Slayerette89 · 06-03-2017, 06:58 PM

I always thought Rory and Alexis got too much hate in the Gilmore Girls fandom. Not that I mind anyone having different opinions on characters and actors of course, but I personally saw Rory as sympathetically flawed and Alexis as fitting for the role, though maybe not as strong as some of other actors there (e.g. Kelly, Lauren, Liza). I'm glad she now gets to challenge herself with a more difficult role like this one. She's done a great job so far.

heartღaflutter · 06-04-2017, 12:37 AM

Some actors were stronger on the show but perhaps also got better material?

I don't feel like Alexis got the same interesting material as Lauren got perhaps.

I love that she was flawed in the original series.. I liked that she started off as seemingly perfect in the first episode and we saw flaws in the course of the 7 seasons that followed.

Though in this one she really gets to convey some real emotion.

**wickedrum** · 06-04-2017, 05:47 AM

Rory wasn't multi-dimensional enough

MyLastDayWithoutYou · 06-04-2017, 06:45 AM

Emily has such a tragic story
I think episode 5 was her last one for this season

la villanelle · 06-04-2017, 08:42 AM

Sad times

heartღaflutter · 06-04-2017, 12:34 PM

I am hoping she'll make a brief appereance before season's end so we'll have to keep wondering over the hiatus break

Slayerette89 · 06-04-2017, 06:37 PM

Realistically, her character should be dead (no way Gilead wouldn't torture and then kill her after she dared to attack one of them), but I too hope she's not.

Quote:

Originally Posted by heartღaflutter (View Post)

Some actors were stronger on the show but perhaps also got better material?

I don't feel like Alexis got the same interesting material as Lauren got perhaps.

I love that she was flawed in the original series.. I liked that she started off as seemingly perfect in the first episode and we saw flaws in the course of the 7 seasons that followed.

Though in this one she really gets to convey some real emotion.

That was also her very first acting job ever, right?

I liked that they introduced some less flattering aspects of Rory later on too. I get the impression Rory-esque characters can rarely win with the audience. If they don't do anything too ethically compromising, they are called Mary Sues (I would agree that Rory was way too beloved by other GG characters and at times seemed to get everything she wanted, but the same goes for her mother and the audience seems to mind that a lot less). If they do, then they are not just flawed but awful ppl (there were articles calling her a monster after the revival, you'd think she started committing war crimes from how much she was vilified) and/or badly written.

Emily definitely gave her a chance to pull off some heavy material.

heartღaflutter · 06-05-2017, 07:32 AM

I didn't agree with what she did on the revival.. I'm still not sure if I believe Rory would be like that at that age... I envisioned her differently despite her being flawed which is nothing wrong with, but to me on Gilmore Girls it felt like a phase she would be in a few years after college. Not almost 10 years later.

Yeah Gilmore Girls was her first gig!

Yeah Emily gave her a chance to bloom!

MyLastDayWithoutYou · 06-05-2017, 10:53 AM

I have never watched Gilmore Girls. So i cant compare her acting with her new gig

la villanelle · 06-05-2017, 12:53 PM

I still haven't seen the latest Gilmore girls

heartღaflutter · 06-05-2017, 02:04 PM

It's okay to check out. I've never seen it twice though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MyLastDayWithoutYou (View Post)

I have never watched Gilmore Girls. So i cant compare her acting with her new gig

What do you think of her in this role then?

la villanelle · 06-06-2017, 12:37 PM

I keep saying im saving it cause I want to keep one thing of pais gellar stay alive.

heartღaflutter · 06-06-2017, 02:30 PM

haha paris was awesome in the revival though

Inside the “Eerie” Night The Handmaid’s Tale Shot Its Most Haunting Scene | Vanity Fair

Quote:

The Scene: The Handmaid’s Tale Season 1, Episode 3:

Ofglen (Alexis Bledel) wakes up in a sterile hospital setting, dressed in white. She lives in a society that has effectively deemed her uterus state property; she’s also just been arrested for having a relationship with another woman. (In The Handmaid’s Tale’s dystopian vision, America has become Gilead—a repressive regime that, thanks to a plague of infertility, forces fertile women to carry powerful men’s children. Ofglen’s real name isn’t Ofglen; it’s Emily, but she’s been renamed for the man she ostensibly belongs to now.)

Ofglen tries to figure out what has been done to her—why there’s a bandage between her legs. Then Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) walks in and cooly answers her question: “You can still have children, of course, but things will be so much easier for you now,” she says. “You won’t want what you can’t have. Blessed be the fruit, dear.”

After Ofglen realizes what’s happened to her, viewers watch several quick jump-cuts, one after another—close-ups of her face going through various stages of grief and fury. It’s never explicitly stated that she’s been the victim of female genital mutilation—but the message gets across just the same. The scene ends as Ofglen lets out an earth-shattering scream.

How It Happened

Director Reed Morano remembers an “eerie kind of stillness” on the evening she and Bledel shot the scene, but it’s also hard not to laugh at the image Morano—who directed the series’s first three episodes—and Bledel conjure as they recall how it came together.

“It was the middle of the night,” says Bledel. “We shot in a real hospital, but that wing of the hospital was not open, obviously. She set up this room. It felt like there was nothing in it, but I think that’s because everything was white.”

“I operated the camera and just got right up in her face and talked her through it—because she asked me to,” Morano says. “We tried some different things and, you know, went through sort of different stages that a character might go through—realization, confusion, the sick feeling once you have that realization, the fear, and then, finally, the anger.”

“She and I were just having our own dialogue—our own exchange,” Bledel says. “And she was so great to go through all of that with me.

“One of the things I was saying to Alexis when we were shooting was, ‘That ****ing bitch!’” Morano says. “‘Don’t you hate her? How could she do this to you?’ We were calling Ann Dowd the worst names ever . . . Alexis was just getting angrier and angrier, and she just let out this blood-curdling scream. And that’s a powerful way to end.”

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the empty room in which Alexis Bledel is cursing out Ann Dowd! And just in case you think the erstwhile Gilmore Girl might have had trouble conjuring sufficient rage, don’t worry: as Bledel puts it, “the anger came really naturally.” When asked if screaming on set made her at all self-conscious, the actress replies, “I didn’t think much about the actual experience of it. I was very much focused on [Ofglen’s] feelings, and for her—and I guess for me in that moment—it just felt like catharsis.”

Leading up to the scream, Morano brought viewers “more and more into [Ofglen’s] brain” through a series of jump cuts—close-ups of her face, with occasional mirror images spliced into the sequence. Those horizontal flips perform double duty, both enabling the scene’s jarring effect and creating an image that’s extra eerie, even for a series as frequently visually disturbing as The Handmaid’s Tale. The human eye can generally tell that something’s not quite right with an image that’s been horizontally flipped. But the effect is subtle enough to just be a little creepy—much like the hospital setting Ofglen finds herself in.

Morano wanted a stark set—free from extra adornments and people, and chillingly institutional. A fan of subtle sound design, Morano steeped this scene in silence: all that viewers hear, aside from the sparse dialogue, are the whirring sounds of the air ducts overhead. The visuals were particularly inspired by George Lucas’s experimental THX 1138.

Against that sparse backdrop, Bledel’s scream—which comes alongside a swell of music, “Waiting for Something” by Jay Reatard—is even more chilling. The scream was especially important, Morano says, as a sign that Ofglen will not be defeated, despite being mutilated. Her reaction to her fate is not despair, but anger—and it ends the episode on a rebellious note, after an hour that sees not only the mutilation of Ofglen, but a devastating setback for Elisabeth Moss’s Offred, who has failed to get pregnant. As the director puts it, “These women are fighters . . . All I could think about was, ‘I want everyone, when they’re done with this scene, to think that this woman is going to come back and **** **** up.’”

la villanelle · 06-06-2017, 02:53 PM

I just love Paris and rory


Fan Forum > Archived Television Shows > The Handmaid's Tale > Emily [Alexis Bledel] #1: The Secret Weapon.