TWO TV HITS & A WEDDING!

THE YOU AND HANDMAID'S TALE STAR REACHES NEW HEIGHTS IN LIFE AND LOVE

- By ESTHER KANG

When Madeline Brewer takes a moment to reflect on how far she's come in her career-she stops herself. “Don't make me cry! I just put on mascara,” says the actress, 33, who's been nonchalantly applying makeup during her Zoom interview. She's having a w irlwind year professionally and personally—she's in two of the buzziest series wrapping up their runs this spring, You and The Handmaid's Tale, plus she has a new thriller movie in the works opposite Diane Lane and a wedding on the horizon. “I think young Maddie would be proud of me,” she says. “She couldn't have dreamed up the life that I have now.”

As a teen growing up in Pitman, N.J., Brewer was focused on a career in musical theater. She studied at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City and made a living by working at Victoria's Secret and a restaurant before she booked her first recurring role as Tricia, an inmate on the Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black. “It was my first job. I was 20 and fresh out of school,” she says. “So much of Tricia's personality was really just me being utterly frightened.”

Brewer appeared on the horror series Hemlock Grove in 2014 and the sci-fit hit Black Mirror