The Handmaid’s Tale has Swifties clamoring for another Taylor Swift re-release album after the Hulu series prominently featured “Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor’s Version)” in its latest episode this week, stirring speculation that Reputation (Taylor’s Version) is finally on the way.
The re-recorded song opened the penultimate episode of the entire Hulu series and played as a fiery anthem to Elisabeth Moss‘ starring June leading a group of handmaids after they pulled off a major coup in their resistance movement against Gilead (the fascist regime that overthrew the U.S. government in the dystopian series). The ninth episode, titled “Execution,” featured some major deaths (read The Hollywood Reporter‘s spoiler postmortem here), and was directed by Moss and written by co-showrunner Eric Tuchman.
Swifties have been speculating that she could be announcing Reputation (Taylor’s Version) at the American Music Awards next week. This isn’t the first time “Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor’s Version)” has been featured on television; it was also featured in a trailer for Amazon’s Wilderness back in 2023, though the feature in Handmaid’s Tale was much more extensive.
“I’ve been wanting to use a Taylor song for many years on the show and we finally found the perfect spot for a track from her, and I’m so glad we waited because there could not be a more perfect song for a more perfect moment,” Elizabeth Moss said in a statement to THR about featuring the track. “Taylor has been such an inspiration to me personally. As a Swifty myself, and I think I can speak for Yvonne [Strahovski] and our entire cast, who are all Swifties, it’s such an honor to be able to use her music in the final episodes of our show. I said to my editor, Wendy [Hallam Martin], ‘I really want to find a place for a Taylor track in the last two episodes of the show,’ and we wanted to find a music queue for the opening of nine. All the credit goes to Wendy for picking this track for this moment!”
Handmaid’s Tale editor Wendy Hallam Martin added: “In trying many songs for this specific moment in our series, and knowing how much Lizzie wanted a strong female voice and message, Taylor was really the artist that delivered both lyrically and tonally. Our badass main character June in this scene really was saying ‘look what you made me do,’ and the song couldn’t have been more on point. A perfect pairing.”
Reputation (Taylor’s Version) would be the fifth of six expected Swift re-records, with Swift’s 2006 eponymous debut the only other album remaining from her original deal with former record label Big Machine. Started from controversy from the dispute over her masters, the re-recordings have become a major success for Swift in their own right, as 1989 (Taylor’s Version), for example beat out the original album’s first-week sales and was one of the best-selling albums of 2024.
The Handmaid’s Tale, meanwhile, now heads into its series finale, which releases Tuesday, May 27.