Where Is Gilead, Really? The Real Locations Behind The Handmaid's Tale
Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its spinoff The Testaments return to the Republic of Gilead—but is this chilling theocracy a real place or pure fiction? Here’s where Margaret Atwood’s world comes from, and how the 2017–2025 series mapped its dystopia onto our own.
Quick answer up top: Gilead is not a real country. It is a fictional theocracy dreamed up by Margaret Atwood and brought to screen by Hulu. But the show went all-in on the map work, so if you ever found yourself squinting at those borders and wondering exactly where this nightmare nation sits, here is how the series itself draws it.
Where Gilead exists in the show
In The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead rises after a Second American Civil War. It swallows big chunks of what used to be the United States, while other zones are considered disputed, and the remnants of the U.S. government flee to Canada along with waves of American refugees.
On the show, Gilead is said to fully occupy these states:
- Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio
- Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina
- Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York
- Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts
It is a lot of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, plus parts of the South. If that scope surprised you, you are not alone. The borders on the show are intentionally stark and a little chilling.
Where they actually filmed it
Most of The Handmaid's Tale was shot in and around Ontario, including Toronto, Mississauga, Brantford, Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, and Cambridge. Season 2 stuck largely to the same Canadian locations. Season 3 mixed in sequences filmed in Washington, D.C., which is why those imposing monuments suddenly started looming in the frame.
The original series, in brief
Based on Atwood's novel, the show ran from 2017 to 2025 and imagines a fertility-crisis future where women are assigned to powerful men to bear children. The core cast included Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Madeline Brewer, Ann Dowd, O-T Fagbenle, Max Minghella, Samira Wiley, and Amanda Brugel.
The Handmaid's Tale is handing the baton to The Testaments
Hulu is spinning the universe forward with The Testaments, led by Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia, this time as the narrator. The story tracks Agnes in Gilead and Daisy in Canada as they collect and smuggle damaging evidence about the regime out of the country. One intriguing wrinkle: Agnes and Daisy operate under the cover of "Pearl Girls" to move into Canada, while Aunt Lydia quietly feeds information from inside Gilead. If you read Atwood's book, you know the Pearl Girls angle has cross-border missionary vibes; the series looks ready to lean into that for undercover work.
Series creator Bruce Miller has been clear that the adaptation will not be a page-for-page mirror of the novel:
"We are making The Testaments, and it's not going to track precisely... Testaments is certainly going to be a sequel to the show."
Translation: expect the TV version to prioritize continuity with the six-season series you just watched over rigidly following the book's structure. Showrunner Yahlin Chang also said the Handmaid's finale leaves deliberate stepping stones for the spinoff, with season 6 tying off some arcs in satisfying ways but keeping others open so The Testaments has real momentum. Or, as she put it, there will be cliffhangers designed to roll right into the new show.
A small preview of the vibe: cast member Chase Infiniti recently called the spinoff a "beautiful darkness." Not exactly beach viewing, but you knew that.
The Testaments premieres April 8 on Hulu.
One last nerdy note
Yes, it is a little meta that the series about Americans fleeing to Canada mostly filmed in Canada. That tension between real locations and fictional borders is part of why the world of Gilead feels so eerily plausible on screen.