‘Do you think I give a shit?’, Madeline Brewer types on her latest Instagram post – approximately five minutes before clicking a Zoom link for her Glamour UK interview. She is sitting in her London apartment where she's staying with her fiancé, replying to a comment that reads, ‘You literally ruined the show. Reddit hates you. Everybody hates you.’ It's a rather visceral reaction to Brontë, Madeline's character in Netflix's fifth and final season of You, who – spoiler alert – is responsible for finally bringing down the show's protagonist, the serial killer Joe Goldberg.
“First of all,” Madeline starts, “I was hired to do a job, And second of all, you are showing your ass right now.” While the response to Madeline's turn as Brontë has largely been positive, some ‘fans’ have clearly gotten weird about it. As well as teenage boys calling her ‘ugly’, Madeline has also navigated online abuse from young women. “It's like 18-year-old girls,” she tells me. “And they hate Brontë because You made a very strong effort to deconstruct a dark romantic hero, and they don't like it when we do that.”
When I connect with Madeline on a bright Friday afternoon earlier in May, she is in the middle of a mammoth press run – an expected consequence of starring in two of 2025's biggest TV shows (the much-hyped final seasons of You and The Handmaid's Tale).
We start by chatting about style; in an age of mob wives, office sirens, and old money, how would Madeline describe her aesthetic? “Sometimes I feel like I look like an old lady, but I also like to feel hot.” She shouts out her stylist, Elizabeth Saltzman, and her assistant, Amelia Levin-Sheffield, noting, “I'm not a person who's on trends. I like skirts and I like belts and I like bags and I like crazy. I like wicked shoes. I don't know how to describe that. I feel like maximalism, but with a little bit of New York chic.”
We originally met up (virtually speaking) to chat about the final season of The Handmaid's Tale, in which Madeline plays fan-favourite Janine Lindo, a pure-hearted rebel captured and crushed by the totalitarian state of Gilead, in which women are systematically raped, beaten, and assigned social roles according to their fertility status.
I point out that survival is rarely a given for Madeline's characters. Like many Orange Is The New Black fans, I'm still haunted by Madeline's portrayal of Tricia Miller, a traumatised teenager who overdoses after being supplied with OxyContin by a twisted prison guard in the first season. “I wouldn't say I'm necessarily drawn to women in captivity,” says Madeline. “But it does seem to be where there's a lot of rich character to work with.”
This is also true of Janine in The Handmaid's Tale, who endures the full spectrum of Gilead's horrors, from being raped and having her child ripped from her arms as a Handmaid, to fending off radiation poisoning in the Colonies before being sold into sexual slavery in Gilead's brothel, Jezebels. And yet, so far, she has survived.
“Janine is so much more resilient than I am,” Madeline reflects. “If I had to go through a day in Janine's shoes, I might collapse and crumble, but she's so resilient and optimistic. It always surprised me when I got the scripts and read about how she's handling what's going on, and I just thought, ‘How is she doing this? And just seeing a silver lining, or just trying to make the best out of the worst possible situation?”
While Janine defies the lifespan of a typical Gilead woman, You's Brontë disrupts her fated path as a victim of Joe Goldberg. “I certainly brought those many years of Janine's survival into Bronte because she's also a survivor of her own very specific story with her mother and having to give up on her dreams.
“She's not a woman in captivity by any means, especially not in the way that we see Tricia Miller or Janine. But she is fighting for an identity. Unfortunately, her identity becomes wrapped up in finding justice for her friend," Madeline continues. “The show speaks a lot to how we obsess on the internet. And that vigilante justice can be dangerous.” However, she adds, “I'm proud to have played the character that brought this homicidal, misogynistic maniac to justice,” Madeline laughs.
We return to The Handmaid's Tale. I apologise before asking Madeline my next question, which I imagine she must get asked all the time. The season premiered in 2017, off the back of Donald Trump's shock election as President of the USA, and now, the season closes in the wake of his return to the White House. What does she make of the parallels between Gilead and the USA, and indeed, the UK?
“It can feel sometimes like everything and nothing has changed,” Madeline begins. “But I also think that Bruce Miller [the show's producer] put it beautifully. At Paley Fest, he said he read this book when it first came out and that every year since it's been published, it feels like we can't possibly get closer than we are now. And I hope that just means that we're becoming more aware and not, and that things are actually getting a whole lot worse.”
She continues, “It has been a gift to be on the show for so many years, and to have been led to be more politically informed and involved because it's impossible to not play these characters, for me at least, to play this character on The Handmaid's Tale and not allow her to be a part of my life and to not stand up for her. When I talk about abortion rights, specifically, Janine, we see that Janine has had an abortion in the fourth season. How could I not fight for her?”
While Madeline is perhaps best known for The Handmaid's Tale, the 2018 thriller Cam, which follows a sex worker, or ‘cam girl’, who is replaced by deepfake technology, holds a special place in her heart. “Cam is my favourite thing I've ever done. I'm so proud of it,” she says. Given that Donald Trump has just signed the Take It Down Act, which addresses non-consensual deepfake abuse, and – thanks in part to the efforts of Glamour UK, survivors, and camapigners – the UK government has introduced new legislation to criminalise the creation of pornographic deepfakes without consent, Cam was clearly ahead of its time.
“I remember at the time that we were shooting Cam, there were conversations around deepfake porn of certain women… very big celebrities. And I just can't imagine how utterly violating that must be. And not only is it for entertainment, it's for sexual arousal, it is to steal something from someone. It is a robbery and a molestation,” says Madeline.
She continues, “I remember naked photos of girls circulating in my high school, and it was that kind of idea of like, oh, well, they deserved it. Why would you take a naked picture on your phone? And the thing is, it will start affecting just regular people, like your mum, sister, or your cousin or your best friend or your girlfriend. It'll start affecting people you love, and people never really even consider caring about something until it hits them at home.”
As our interview wraps up, we come back, as we often do, to Janine. What's Madeline's final message from Janine? “We only have Janine now in season six because Janine chose to stay in season one. She did everything she could to stay because she knew she had a child,” Madeline reflects.
“I think the strongest thing you can do is to stay. Things will always get better. Then they might get worse again, but they will always get better.”
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
Things are about to get very, very intense.
