What is it about Christopher Meloni? Whether he’s playing a mushy-hearted detective with a dark side, a weirdo cook whose best friend is a can of vegetables, and a cop turned hit man who hangs out with a winged blue unicorn, he slides into every role with equal ease. That chameleonic power is on display again in this season of The Handmaid’s Tale, which finds Meloni in perhaps his most menacing role yet.
As we saw last week, Meloni’s character—Commander George Winslow—is an imposing guy, even to other powerful people in the autocratic theocracy of Gilead. He speaks in a low growl; he leans in very close when he’s addressing someone; he’s got a lot of kids. To Meloni that last quality is an especially important indicator of how powerful this character is. As he explained in a recent phone interview, every society values certain things more than others. In the nation of Gilead, where a mysterious bout of infertility means that many women have trouble conceiving babies, “for one person to be hoarding so many children, I’m like, This guy’s basically Kublai Khan in a way,” he said.
Meloni had already seen the series when the opportunity to join its third season as a guest star arose. Still, he decided to study up, bingeing around eight of the show’s most recent episodes. “I don’t suggest it,” Meloni said. “It’s a lot of dystopian in one fell swoop.... It’s a tough slog.”
But Meloni’s studious approach did offer him some insights into the world of Margaret Atwood’s seminal novel, and how his character should operate within it.
“The commanders I’d seen so far...they commanded such power, and yet they were afraid,” Meloni said. “There’s always this fear attendant to their position in this society. I could be completely wrong, but...I felt like these guys were very tight.” Gilead’s leadership, the actor observed, is very cutthroat—with each commander seemingly determined to take out his comrades in order to enhance his own position. Commander Winslow, Meloni decided, would be different: “He wears his power effortlessly.”
“I don’t think you get in his position without being a master of manipulation and subterfuge,” Meloni said. He wanted Winslow to be unpredictable—and once he heard how many kids the character had, he felt he had the character locked down. “It’s a guy who has voracious appetites, you know? He can’t have enough works of art. Whatever the power and monetary things are, whatever gives someone status and power, he can’t have enough.”
The role is a relatively small one, at least so far this season. But Meloni makes the most of each moment he occupies—and, most delightfully, seems to intimidate even Joseph Fiennes’s slimy Fred Waterford, who deserves to get knocked down a peg. Then again, Waterford did vow this week to bring baby Nichole back to Gilead, directly defying Winslow’s instructions to let the infant remain in Canada so that she could be added leverage during negotiations between the nations. Given the way this world works, retribution for his action seems likely—and given the way Meloni describes his character’s management style, it seems safe to guess that his good-natured chats with Fred might be short-lived.
“I think he’s very much hands off—knowing that you know that if you eff it up, there will probably be severe consequences,” Meloni said. “Everything is great, everything’s fantastic, until it’s not. And then—[insert ominous, lingering silence]. That’s how I would kind of think his governing style would be.”
