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Madeline Brewer is saying a bittersweet goodbye to The Handmaid’s Tale.

After spending eight years playing the resilient, one-eyed character Janine on the hit dystopian drama, the actress opens up about how the role has shaped her — and what’s next.

“So I started on The Handmaid’s Tale when I was 24 and I just turned 33 last week,” Brewer, 33, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “So it’s quite a bit of time spent together, a lot of growing. My frontal lobe wasn’t cooked yet when we started.”

“I think of her so fondly,” Brewer says of Janine, noting that describing her as a sister was “too close” but a best friend was too far. “She’s so much a part of me. But we’re so different. I think in a lot of ways on the surface, she’s much gentler than I am, but she’s also much stronger than I am. I really admire her.”

Over the years, the actress admits that Janine has taught her many lessons, particularly in sisterhood and activism, that have “changed me cellularly.”

“She’s much more compassionate, I think, than I can be sometimes,” she says of her character. “I think she’s more resilient than me, and I’ve taken some of her resilience with me. I tend to catastrophize and she obviously looks for the silver lining in everything.”

“She’s a fierce, fierce friend and I am as well. So I think that’s a way in which we’re alike,” she adds.

Based on the bestselling book by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale has been consistently revered for its acting performances, writing and production design, taking home two Golden Globes, 15 Emmys and countless nominations over the series’ run.

After premiering it’s first season in 2017, Hulu announced that the series would be concluding with its sixth season. The finale airs May 27.

Though it’s been “hard to say goodbye,” the actress confesses that she felt “like our circle is completed.”

“I’ve given her everything I can give her, she’s given me everything she’s supposed to give me, and it’s a natural ending,” she continues. “It’s time for us to move on.”

Brewer says that her last day on set was like any other.

“We wrapped under a bridge in the middle of nowhere in Canada, and it was snowing and it was freezing and it was 3 o’clock in the morning,” she recalls. “I don’t know that it’s even hit me yet that it’s over.”

“It wasn’t particularly emotional though,” she says of the cast’s “amazing” final wrap party. “For some people it was, like Yvonne [Strahovski] was a mess, but I know for me, it’s just time to move on.”

She’s plenty busy as this chapter of her professional life ends. Brewer is set to marry British cinematographer Jack Thompson-Roylance, in a July wedding in England.

She’ll even have two Handmaid’s Tale costars, Nina Kiri and Bahia Watson, by her side as bridesmaids.

“They’re two of my closest friends. And we shared this incredible thing together,” she told PEOPLE in April. “But it’s gone far beyond that. I mean, those are two of the best people in the world, and they’re my friends. I get to be friends with them.”

As a “perfectionist,” Brewer wants everything to go smoothly to pull off her vision of “Bridgerton by day and Saltburn at night.” But she has no nerves when it comes to saying “I do.”

“That’s my dude,” she says. “It’s going to be fun.”

The series finale of The Handmaid’s Tale airs Tuesday, May 27 on Hulu.