“The overall feeling is one of gratitude”: O-T Fagbenle on the end of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and his past, present, and future

Posted On May 23, 2025May 23, 2025

After six seasons, 64 episodes, two Golden Globe wins, and 15 Primetime Emmy victories from a combined total of over 80 nominations across both awards ceremonies, The Handmaid’s Tale reaches its conclusion when the series finale airs on Hulu on May 27th, 2025.

O-T Fagbenle has starred as Luke Bankole since the beginning, earning an Emmy nod for ‘Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series’ in 2021 for his performance, so there are inevitably mixed feelings for the actor knowing that such a huge chapter of his life and career is almost officially over.

“Wow, when you put it like that, it’s something funny,” he admitted. “People have asked me that, well, I don’t really think of it in those terms. Handmaid’s is going to stay with me. Obviously, the episodes exist, but the relationships I’ve created will still exist, and I have a lot of gratitude for what I’ve managed to do.”

“I think the overall feeling is one of gratitude,” Fagbenle continued. “I’m not much of a nostalgic person. I guess I’m just grateful for now and grateful to be able to see this show off well.” He may not be the nostalgic type, but with his casting first being announced in September 2016, it’s been almost a decade-long journey from beginning to end.

“When you say it like that, it makes me think about it in those contexts,” he said of his perspective on The Handmaid’s Tale now there’s some distance between his last-ever day on the set and the incoming premiere of the finale. “I’m just really proud of it.”

“I’m really proud of the growth that I’ve managed to achieve as a person, as an artist, and lots of that is connected to the show and the people I’ve got to work with. I’m proud of the show itself and being able to be part of a piece of art which is also quite explicitly political and social, and that’s quite a rare thing. You get these huge shows, Game of Thrones or whatever, amazing shows, but it’s very rare to get a show that also makes a political, social statement. So I’m really, really proud to be part of that as well.”

Luke is the husband of Elisabeth Moss’ June Osborne, with the couple and their daughter being forcibly separated while trying to flee the country when the totalitarian government of Gilead establishes control of society. For the first five seasons, Luke spends a lot of time on the outside looking in during his efforts to reunite with his wife and child, but in the sixth season, he gets a different kind of journey.

The character is more active and hands-on this time around, and Fagbenle relished the opportunity to take the character in a new direction and embark on a different narrative journey. “I was really excited,” he explained. “It’s different showrunners this year, and I know they wanted to make bold choices.”

One of those choices even allowed the actor to reference one of the show’s signature phrases: “I think allowing Luke to fruit, as it were, blessed be his fruit, to let him blossom and help him change, to come to this kind of manifestation of his destiny, I thought was right and brave, and I think they did a great job of it.”

With that in mind, did that create any additional pressure? After all, not only has Luke’s role become more hands-on, but with the sixth season being the last, and with showrunners Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang taking over from longtime steward Bruce Miller, the cast, crew, screenwriters, and producers needed to stick the landing and give The Handmaid’s Tale audience the satisfying resolution they’ve been waiting for since the first episode landed in April 2017.

“Interesting question,” Fagbenle pondered. “I try to resist the external pressures. Most of my pressure comes from inside and wanting to do justice to myself as an artist, which is my relationship with the script and my co-stars. I have to prepare well, because the script deserves it, the cast, my co-stars, so I think that’s where most of my pressure and motivation comes from, to some extent.”

“Between my performance and the screen, there are executive producers and directors, and there’s an edit, a musical score, and all of these things complete as a score, musical score. There are sound effects, there are so many things that come between what I do in front of the camera and what the audience sees that for me to be too attached to that end product, it’s like those are the things out of my control. So, I just focus on the things in my control and try to do a good job with those.”

The dynamic between Fagbenle’s Luke, Moss’ June, and Max Minghella’s Nick Blaine has become one of the show’s biggest linchpins. The latter develops an intimate relationship with June, but calling it a love triangle is a disservice. That said, was it challenging for the three actors to build, deepen, and inform three individual storylines that are so tightly woven together when they don’t exactly share many scenes as a trio?

“Nah,” came the honest reply. “I mean, it’s so big picture. The way, at least, I approach it is one scene at a time. There’s a scene in front of us, and I have to work out this thing with my onscreen wife, and I love her, and I think I just get involved in the minutiae of that and leave the big plans for writers and people above my pay grade to figure out! Max is such an extraordinary talent and actor, and Lizzie is the phenomenon that she is. It’s just so fun to play that with them.”

How does Fagbenle play that as an actor, though? On one hand, there’s the outcome Luke wants and believes is best, even though there are no guarantees that June will reciprocate because his character hasn’t been physically present for so much of what she’s been through, which by extension means his performance across six seasons is often based on unseen and unsaid aspects of the story.

“I think in all our lives, in every moment, we don’t know how people will respond, necessarily, and things may not go our way,” he pondered. “I think it’s the same for most characters, and in good dramas, definitely the case where the stakes are high, and what they’re fighting for is important to them, but there is uncertainty, and in that uncertainty is drama, and that makes for good watching.”

It’s clear that Fagbenle’s focus has always been on the micro of his contributions to The Handmaid’s Tale and how his performance serves the scenes he’s in, as opposed to keeping his eyes on the macro of the show’s expansive storytelling, a sentiment that also applies to how he wants viewers to take away from the overall six-season experience.

“I think whatever resonates specifically for them,” he opined. “For some people, it’s the big political pictures of misogyny and power imbalance, and you know, governments and administrations which are oppressive. And for other people, it’s more intimate. It’s about love and connection and the loss of love and connection. And so whatever it is that moves each individual, I think.”

Going right back to the start of his career, a saxophone rented by his grandmother at the age of ten began Fagbenle’s journey in the creative arts. While music has always been an essential part of his professional life, a key moment in his formative years cemented acting as his primary focus.

“It was when I got into drama school,” he recalled. “I didn’t expect to get into drama school. They only took 17 boys and 17 girls out of something like 2000 people who auditioned for RADA. Like most drama schools back then, they took an average of one Black person a year, so I was faced with odds.”

“Odds, which, people told me, with the best of love, that it was very unlikely that I would get in, and when I did get in, I thought, ‘Well, I have an extraordinary opportunity here. I should definitely take it.” Fagbenle did most of his early work on the stage, but he still found the time to make early onscreen appearances in a couple of small-screen British staples.

When it was pointed out that he’s the only actor in history who’s been in EastEnders and Hollyoaks who’s also played the President of the United States after starring as Barack Obama in the 2022 anthology series The First Lady, Fagbenle burst into hysterics before confessing that it wasn’t something that could have possibly been part of his thinking when he was first starting.

“I mean, what’s really funny is that even before doing TV, I was a theatre actor, and that’s all I cared about,” he recalled. “All I had ambitions to do was theatre. So yeah, none of being on EastEnders and Barack and being the first to do the two hadn’t entered my mind!”

In another full-circle moment, Fagbenle won rave reviews for playing Leevee in a 2016 production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which won an Olivier Award for ‘Best Revival’. Viola Davis played the title role in the 2020 film adaptation and earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’, before the two played husband and wife as Barack and Michelle Obama in The First Lady, but has he ever found himself stopping to think about how these incredible chains of events have come to pass?

“Yeah, it’s a really good question,” he wondered. “I vacillate between the feeling that luck is the thing that makes all the difference in somebody’s life. I think that’s actually the main thing I believe. I think I’ve been extremely lucky, and all those things you say, to be in Hollywood, to work as an actor, to work with someone like Viola Davis, I just feel incredibly lucky. And of course, I work hard, I work really hard, as hard as I can, and I always think I could work harder, but luck plays such a huge role.”

Fagbenle also has many more strings to his bow than being a performer. In fact, he made history when Maxxx, the six-part comedy series in which he plays a fallen boyband member attempting a comeback, saw him become the first person to be credited as the creator, star, writer, director, composer, and executive producer of a TV pilot that premiered on a major network or streaming service when it debuted on Hulu in 2020.

As challenging as it was to wear so many hats at once, the sense of freedom that comes with self-creation is something he’s keen to return to in the future. “It’s hard, and it really took years off my life, I genuinely believe that,” he said. “But there is something about it.”

“In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, [the idea that the conceptualisation of goals motivates human behaviour as posited by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943], he talks about basically the self-fulfilment, self-actualisation, and there’s a feeling I get when I’m, like, creating television like that, when I’m acting and writing, directing and stuff like that, it feels like the edge of what’s possible for me. And so to do it, it feels like a big stretch. And, there’s a part of my being, my raison d’être, which is about stretching myself beyond what I think I’m capable of.”

Most of Fagbenle’s credits have been on television and stage, with Marvel Studios’ Black Widow and writer and director Michael Angelo Covino’s upcoming Splitsville being the actor’s only theatrically released feature film appearances since 2008. Has it been a conscious decision to prioritise the material and challenges presented by the characters instead of making a movie for the sake of being in the movie, or is that just how the dominoes have been falling?

“There’s a lot of domino-falling,” he accepted. “I would love to do more films. I don’t know. The television, you know, the point of my career where I started coming into my 30s or whatever, television just had this huge ‘Golden Age’ and so I’ve just ridden that wave. I’m sure in another Sliding Doors moment, I would be doing different things.”

As mentioned, Fagbenle played Rick Mason opposite Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow and returned to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a brief cameo in the Samuel L Jackson-led streaming series Secret Invasion. Understandably, he’d be more than ready to answer the call whenever the highest-grossing franchise in cinema history next requires his services.

“I love the way you put that,” he laughed. “I’m ready. I love working with Marvel, and I love Mason. So yeah, who knows? You may see more of him yet.” Throughout his career, Fagbenle has tackled drama, dystopia, superheroes, comedy, period pieces, biography, and more, but there’s one genre missing from the list he’d love to tick off sooner rather than later.

“I’m a big sci-fi fan,” he shared. “I’m doing a sci-fi comedy at the moment, but I’d be up for doing some more grounded sci-fi and some more hard sci-fi as well. I like those two genres, and I’m really into tech.” That said, if he had to name one performance from his back catalogue that he’d point people towards for the definitive O-T Fagbenle experience (so far), it’s his passion project.

“I would say go to Hulu and watch Maxxx,” he said. “That’s probably the closest. A lot of my theatre shows. I think of things that you mentioned, Ma Rainey, is close to my heart as a performer. But, yeah, check out Maxxx.”

Looking towards the future, the actor has three things he’d love to do that cover his wide range of interests as an actor and creative: “I’m developing a couple of things right now, which I would love to make. There’s a good chance of us making it, so I think that would be number one, top of my list.”

Fagbenle maintained an air of mystery around his unnamed self-created projects, but the other two weren’t bound to the same levels of secrecy. “Shakespeare-wise, I’ve always wanted to play Iago,” he revealed. “I really love that role, and so I’d love a chance to do that someplace great, maybe the National or something. I mean, and, of course, Mason coming back and doing the Mason show.”

A passion project, an iconic Shakespeare character, and a return to Marvel hardly sounds far-fetched, and Fagbenle immediately got the ball rolling: “Manifest, manifest, manifest, manifest, manifest, manifest.”

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