Captain Marvel star Mckenna Grace, who played the younger version of Carol in flashbacks, has joined the upcoming fourth season of Hulu‘s The Handmaid’s Tale in the role of “Mrs. Keyes.” She will be shooting in Toronto, where production just resumed, in the coming weeks. Back in March, production on the fourth season of the Elisabeth Moss-starring dystopian drama was halted due to the pandemic, but the show is back on, with Moss set to direct her first episode this season. The series was only a couple of weeks into filming the new season when the shutdown hit, so it’s likely that the show is more or less starting from scratch.
Deadline, who first broke the story, describes Mrs. Keyes as a recurring character and “a sharply intelligent, teenaged wife of a much older Commander who rules her farm and household with confidence. She has a rebellious, subversive streak, and is calm and pious on the outside with turmoil, even insanity, on the inside.”
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Based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale is set in Gilead, a totalitarian society in what used to be part of the United States. Gilead is ruled by a fundamentalist regime that treats women as property of the state, and is faced with environmental disasters and a plummeting birth rate. In a desperate attempt to repopulate a devastated world, the few remaining fertile women are forced into sexual servitude. One of these women, Offred, is determined to survive the terrifying world she lives in, and find the daughter that was taken from her.
The series hails from MGM Television and stars stars Moss, Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Samira Wiley, Alexis Bledel, Ann Dowd, Max Minghella, Madeline Brewer, O-T Fagbenle, Amanda Brugel, Bradley Whitford, and Sam Jaeger who has been upped to a series regular.
“It’s not up to me, but I think that we all agree that this is the story of one woman and it’s not the story of Gilead,” Moss shared with ComicBook.com of the series’ trajectory. “We’re tracking her story and we’re taking care of her story and it will be up at some point. I think that we keep that as our guideline. When we feel like that story has been told, then it will be over.”
That said, there could be more about Gilead to explore in a different series. Last fall saw the debut of Atwood’s sequel novel, The Testaments, which took place 15 years after the events of the original novel, though long before its predecessor’s epilogue. Ahead of that book’s release, Hulu and MGM announced that they would be developing a new series inspired by that book, with showrunner Bruce Miller at the helm.
You can see Grace next in March’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
