Plus, the two discuss what their characters’ end games are in this final season.

High Commander Wharton will see you now.

After much foreboding talk but no show, the powerful Gilead figure — father to Rose (Carey Cox) and father-in-law to Nick (Max Minghella) — has finally made his debut in the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. In the premiere, which included the first three episodes, series newcomer Josh Charles adds an ominous flare to all of his scenes as Wharton, with veiled threats and a penchant for saying much with very little. He also immediately seems to fancy Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), which can’t be good.

He’s here to keep a tight leash on Nick, which seems to be working for him until episode 3, when Nick leaves to help June (Elisabeth Moss) rescue Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and Moira (Samira Wiley) in No Man’s Land, and ends up shooting two Gilead soldiers who try and stop them.

Ahead, Entertainment Weekly sits down with Charles and Minghella to unpack what to expect from this menacing new character, the relationship between Nick and Wharton, Nick’s deadly mistake, and more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Josh, when they announced you were joining the show, Hulu didn’t specify who you were playing, even though we’ve heard the name Commander Wharton in prior seasons. Why all the secrecy, do you think?

JOSH CHARLES: That’s interesting. They were being a little shady about it. Yeah, I think I understand why. Listen, I think in today’s world, we know everything about everything before it’s even seen. And so I think the element of surprise is important for any narrative structure. I think it’s helpful. And so I personally like that because I want to know less when I see something. I want to watch it and see it and not have sort of prejudgments about it.

But I think ultimately it [gave me] the ability to come in and be a part of this ensemble to help them finish telling the story, that I had been a fan of, and play a character who is quite complicated and quite dark in many ways, but also has a lot of humanity. And I think that was part of what was interesting to me about it was to play a character and work on a character’s brutality and sort of highlight his brutality by his kindness that I thought was really, really interesting to me. That someone that you see has a brutality in a character, like you have in many other characters in this show, but what separates his brutality is I feel he’s very kind and thoughtful and very true to his beliefs, if that makes sense.

Tell me about what to expect from the relationship between your two characters this season.

CHARLES: I think for me, the entry point into the show is through Nick, right? Obviously, through my daughter primarily. I’m coming in at a time of some crisis in their relationship and I think wanting to protect my daughter and keep an eye on Nick, and I think that is how I enter into the universe of this show. And I think what Wharton’s trying to show Nick is he sees Nick sort of falling under the tutelage of different men in his life, and I think he’s trying to encourage him to come and take that tutelage from himself. I think that’s what he would like, we’ll see how that unfolds, but I think that’s the idea is to first keep an eye on him, get him to straighten up and fly right, and take care of his daughter, and do the right thing. And then obviously a lot of other things happen and take place that takes them all on different journeys throughout the season.

MINGHELLA: I think they were so clever to cast Josh because he’s somebody who is just as a person and in his career very charismatic and very aspirational. And so I think for Nick, it gives him a paternal figure he hasn’t really had before in that way. Now you can definitely debate the moral and ethical position of High Commander Wharton, but he is offering a path to becoming a man, I guess, in a way that he hasn’t really been shown before, even if it’s a misguided one. So I think it’s quite appealing to him. He’s obviously had a very strong relationship with Lawrence in the past, but Lawrence is, I think, visibly sort of a quite chaotic person, an unstable person, and so he’s not as aspirational.

Max, your poor Nick is always perpetually stuck between a rock and a hard place, and with his decision to shoot the guards, I can’t imagine that getting any easier for him. Tell me about the consequences of that for him.

MINGHELLA: I’d say the season is action-packed and filled with surprises, and so it would be superfluous for me, I think, to talk about something that happens so early on in the narrative. There’s just a lot coming and it’s a really rich season. People who’ve stuck with us this long, God bless them, and I’m grateful to them and I hope that we deliver with some satisfying conclusions. You can’t please everybody, but I think hopefully it’s going to be really unpredictable for you guys.

Given that this is the final season, were you surprised where your characters’ arcs went?

CHARLES: I’ll jump in first. Nothing technically surprised me because we read [all the scripts], so it wasn’t surprising in terms of the making of it. But I think, for me, I can just speak for my character, that was my challenge — I wasn’t really interested in just playing somebody who’s just thought of as just an evil character. That’s just not interesting. I wanted that push and pull and that dynamic, the tension of having this true belief and this sort of inner sureness of how the world orders should be and also falling in love and being enthralled with someone that takes you to a place that maybe you shouldn’t be in or with a person you shouldn’t be with. I thought that was really an interesting dynamic to see. So I was enjoying exploring that and that was sort of my goal was to try to color what was on the page as much as I could with that.

MINGHELLA: I think this was the first time I probably had any kind of inkling of what was going to happen in the season going into it, just because I’d been working with [Moss] on something else before. So actually we were talking and she was telling me what was up, so I knew a little bit this time what was going to happen, but I’ve often enjoyed the mystery of it in the past. It’s a fun thing about TV is you don’t know really what’s going to happen with your character when you sign onto it in the beginning. Much like life, where I have no idea what will happen tomorrow despite my best efforts.

Max Minghella as Nick Blaine in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ season 6 episode 2. Steve Wilkie/Disney

What is Nick’s end game this season? What is Wharton’s?

MINGHELLA: I’m actually going to say with Nick, I think he’s trying to figure that out. I think that is his end game, is trying to figure out his end game. I know that’s not a helpful answer, but I actually think that’s the truth. I think he’s really trying to decide what path to take. Nick is a real example of the importance of education. He’s not a super-educated guy and I think that hasn’t helped him particularly in his life. He’s quite lost. He doesn’t have his own compass really to make decisions. So I think that’s why he’s often “between a rock and a hard place,” as you say, is because he’s pretty s— at navigating things.

CHARLES: Well, there’s the end game that’s written and then there’s the end game that you sort of imagine, that you fill in the blanks of the character. And I think for Wharton, he’s a high commander from D.C., he cares passionately about his daughter, he is a widower, and I think he wants to lead Gilead. I think that’s his ultimate goal. I mean, that was my personal opinion and that was how I approached it; it gave me a place to know where he’s going. He has political aspirations, and it was discussed early on when I was agreeing to do the show; the writers had even said they imagined him as a politician in the previous pre-Gilead world. And I was like, That makes total sense, because that is kind of how he struck me. But that dynamic really stayed with me, and that gave me a place to think, That’s where he wants to go, so that was my through line.