Offred
47
MENTIONS
11
EPISODES
7
PODCASTS
Search complete. 47 mentions across 11 episodes found for "Offred".
Oct 2, 2026
speaker_2HOST
Right.
speaker_2HOST
Readers around the world intimately knew characters like Anne Shirley or, you know, Offred from The Handmaid's Tale.
speaker_2HOST
But if you ask those same readers to name a Canadian film director, [laughs] you would just get a blank stare.
speaker_1HOST
Wow.
10 MINS LATER
speaker_2HOST
And there is no more instructive example of this challenge than Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale.
speaker_1HOST
Right.
speaker_1HOST
Set in the theocratic republic of Gilead, following Offred, a woman forced into reproductive servitude.
speaker_2HOST
Yeah.
Jennie GageGUEST
No, I'm Jenny Gage.
Jennie GageGUEST
Offred, welcome.
Jennie GageGUEST
Thank you.
Jennie GageGUEST
Thank you.
speaker_0HOST
Fertile women are stripped of their names, assigned to the ruling class of commanders, and treated strictly as reproductive property.
speaker_1HOST
And the book is written as a first person, almost suffocating internal monologue by Offred.
speaker_0HOST
But the challenge of adapting a first person internal monologue to television is that a TV show requires external action.
speaker_1HOST
Exactly.
speaker_1HOST
The book famously ends on an incredibly ambiguous note.
speaker_1HOST
Offred steps into a van, and we never know if she's being taken to the resistance or the secret police.
speaker_0HOST
Right, and the adaptation looks at that ambiguity and says, "No, we have to keep going.
speaker_0HOST
We have to show what happens next."
Dorothy GaleHOST
So this is the world that we live in, in this book.
Dorothy GaleHOST
And we have hope, because our hero, Offred...
Dorothy GaleHOST
And stop.
Dorothy GaleHOST
Oh! all right undine you gotta
22 MINS LATER
MarionHOST
And I feel like that's the kind of thing we're seeing in society today, particularly with particular individuals who are put into power, who may or may not have a certain expertise, but they will be a yes person to what the regime wants to happen.
Dorothy GaleHOST
Andine, where did you see transformation and control?
UndineGUEST
Well, I keep going back to Offred and her transformation, you know, and her personal control of her environment and how she sees that opening with the commander through playing Scrabble with him of, oh, here's an opportunity for me to change her situation.
UndineGUEST
And obviously, I'm sure she and in this imaginary scenario, she and all the women were looking for those windows of opportunity, but she had the bravery to take that on.
Matthew HilbornHOST
So Bene Wiser have both written about this, that there's a kind of rise of a new visibility of feminist anger, right? That there are kind of furious female on-screen heroines in TV.
Matthew HilbornHOST
I'm thinking of like, Jessica Jones or Offred in Handmaid's Tale.
Matthew HilbornHOST
So there's a kind of way in which globalised media culture is accommodating female fury as a kind of legitimist.
Matthew HilbornHOST
And I wouldn't say she's irate in this film, but, you know, she has a legitimate.
JohnHOST
I didn't see a single episode of Mad Men, so I had only the vaguest notion that she played Peggy on that series, even though she's a major character.
JohnHOST
And although I knew she played Offred on the smash hit adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, I'm just not really a TV guy, so I missed that as well.
JohnHOST
I didn't even see Girl Interrupted or Suburban Commando, both of which she's in.
JohnHOST
So while I knew she was justly famed for her acting, and I knew she was someone entirely different from Elizabeth Banks of Slither fame, this was where I really dialed in on her for the first time.
Sarah L. KaufmanGUEST
But there are passages like this one that really snap into focus.
Sarah L. KaufmanGUEST
And here she is talking about the commander's sitting room, okay? And Offred is describing it.
Sarah L. KaufmanGUEST
And she says...
Sarah L. KaufmanGUEST
The sitting room is one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.
Dorothy GaleHOST
And They are expected to produce children for high-ranking government officials or others whose status is high enough for that privilege.
Dorothy GaleHOST
And since Offred was there at the start of the takeover, we see how Gilead's government is attempting to reshape society.
Dorothy GaleHOST
So that's what we get a lot of throughout the book, sort of how things are different now than they had been.
Dorothy GaleHOST
So kind of a transformation.
Dorothy GaleHOST
Sorry, that would be a theme that we will read in part two as we discuss the book.
Dorothy GaleHOST
Anyways, we get to see how people are reacting to the government's shaping of things
MarionHOST
through the eyes of Offred.
MarionHOST
And Offred, just to clarify a little bit more, Dorothy talked about that her name is of Fred smushed together.
Jennifer DavisHOST
I lower my eyes to the path, glide by her, hoping to be invisible, knowing I'll be ignored.
Jennifer DavisHOST
"'Offred,' she says.
Jennifer DavisHOST
I pause, uncertain.
Jennifer DavisHOST
"'Yes, you.' I turn towards her.
speaker_5HOST
So Atwood builds a society where the solution to that scarcity is the complete commodification of the female body.
speaker_5HOST
You have the protagonist, Offred, who is forced into this cast called the Handmaids.
speaker_5HOST
Their sole biological purpose is to bear children for the ruling class.
speaker_6HOST
The powerful government commanders and their wives.
speaker_6HOST
They start them.
speaker_6HOST
They burn the books.
speaker_5HOST
The protagonist is Guy Montag, and he's one of these firemen.
speaker_6HOST
Right.
1 more episode mentions Offred.
Create an account to see the whole feed, search across every transcript, and follow the entities you care about.