The Cruelty of Aunt Lydia

This story contains spoilers for Season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Ann Dowd is one of the most gifted character actors of this TV age, and yet I’ve always struggled with Aunt Lydia, the authoritarian, Bible-passage-spewing antagonist she plays on The Handmaid’s Tale. Bruce Miller’s Hulu series loves, above all things, to humanize its most horrific characters, and so Dowd’s Aunt Lydia—much like Yvonne Strahovski’s Serena Waterford—switches modes between ruthlessness and vulnerability at a dizzying pace. In a recent episode of Season 3, “Household,” a visibly chastened Lydia wept at the sight of handmaids whose mouths had been sewn shut. “When I get tired,” Lydia told June (played by Elisabeth Moss), “I try to think of all the good I can do in God’s world. And if I can help just one person, one soul, that’s enough.”

And yet. Just a few episodes earlier, LydiaThe cruelty, as my colleague Adam Serwer wrote in an about the Trump administration, is the point. And many of the president’s supporters, Serwer wrote, find not just comfort but also community in cruelty—“an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.”