Double Emmy Nominee Ann Dowd Talks The Handmaid’s Tale and The Leftovers

Frightening to begin with, The Handmaid’s Tale gets even more creepy fifteen minutes into the first episode with the introduction of “Aunt Lydia.” Played with fierce authority by Ann Dowd, Lydia hectors a group of young women forced to bear children for the men who rule near-future “Gilead.” Striding around the classroom in short hair, drab gown and combat boots, Lydia stops at the desk of a surly student and abruptly jabs the handmaid with a cattle prod.

The Leftovers Production Designer on Season 3’s Mind-Bending Finish

"It's really hard to create Gary Busey as a blow-up doll," says production designer John Paino, and he should know. For HBO's third and final season of The Leftovers (debuting April 16), Paino oversaw the creation of a 35-foot inflated figure of the toothy celebrity, a major attraction for the Texas spiritual mecca-turned-tourist trap known as Jarden. "The blow-up doll is about this mix of a pop culture sensibility with the beginnings perhaps of some spiritual movement,"

Damon Lindelof Returns to TV to for HBO’s The Leftovers

“Two percent doesn’t sound like much, but, two percent of the entire planet, of every person on it, that’s more than the world’s ten largest cities combined. That’s more than every death from every war in the 20th century. If every one of those people joined hands, they’d wrap around the world six times. It’s one hundred and forty million people. And like that…they were gone.”

The above quote comes from one of the clever,