The Handmaid's Tale's Alexis Bledel Breaks Down Emily's Tough Family Reunion

Emily (Alexis Bledel) may finally have made it out of Gilead and into the safety of Little America in Canada, but if you thought her harrowing journey on The Handmaid's Tale would be over, you'd be wrong. And you'd be missing out on what could be Alexis Bledel's best work on the Hulu series.

After crossing into Canada and claiming asylum for herself and baby Nicole, Emily had an incredibly difficult time assimilating back into normal life. At first she was incredibly hesitant to contact her wife and try to reclaim any real part of her life from "before." Bledel explained Emily's reluctance to indulge in what viewers might expect to be her first impulse for a couple of reasons, one of them being that in the real world, refugees often follow this same path once they find themselves free from stifling regimes.

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"I got to speak to Andi [Gitow, the executive producer at the United Nations]. I was able to ask a lot of questions about where Emily would be mentally, emotionally, and she helped me better understand the experience of refugees who are reunited with their families and what they go through," Bledel told TV Guide. "I think to a great extent they feel incredibly isolated because the experience that they have had is so different from what their loved ones have been experiencing at the same time. So, it's a huge disconnect, and to bridge that gap takes time and a lot of work on everyone's part to pour a great deal of effort into those connections... She's basically experiencing a great deal of PTSD, being kind of thrust back into society and trying to assimilate back into family life, and feel like some new version of herself again. And that's a huge process that she has to undertake."

In Wednesday's episode, titled "God Bless the Child," we saw Emily finally start to take small steps towards rebuilding her family by reuniting with her wife and son. Instead of a sweeping reunion full of tears and hugs though, we watched Emily hesitate with every breath while interacting with her family. The simple act of reading a bedtime story to her son, who was intent on snuggling up to his recently returned mother, broke her into a million pieces.

"Her expectations are huge for seeing her son again," Bledel said of Emily's tentative approach to seeing her family. "But she doesn't even know if he'll remember her, or what he'll remember about her. What he's going to think of how she is now, how different she is. And she really has no idea whether Sylvia will ever understand what she's been through or some of the choices she made as she herself is trying to piece it all together and reevaluate it in this new light that she finds herself in."

"I think she's really broken and really deeply emotional," she continued. "And she's making the decision not to show a lot of that moment to moment because she doesn't want to scare her son or Sylvia. And she really, really wants to be allowed to reunite with him, you know? She doesn't want them to push her away and she doesn't want to push them away. But it's very painful for her. It's painful to feel good emotions even because they're so foreign to her at this point. And to be open to that, and to feel that, is incredibly painful."

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Bledel promised we'll see more of Emily's uncertain path back toward building a life for herself and her family this season, so you can probably expect even more emotional moments from her and her family unit to come.

There's also a chance, Bledel said, that Emily could find herself involved in the political drama about whether to return baby Nicole to Gilead."There's no way to separate herself from it because she was the one to carry the baby across. So if somebody wanted to call her into that they could," she said.

New episodes of The Handmaid's Tale are released Wednesdays on Hulu.