While working on the film, Robert Duvall became so fascinated with evangelism that it inspired him to write The Apostle (1997).
Canadian reporter Sheldon Teitelbaum once wrote of this film's development: "During the next two and a half years, Wilson would take the script to every studio in Hollywood, encountering a wall of ignorance, hostility, and indifference." Studio executives knocked the picture, saying that it was "a film for and about women, would be lucky if it made it to video."
The lead role of Kate/Offred was offered to Jodie Foster and Sigourney Weaver, the latter of whom had to drop out when she got pregnant.
The repressive theocratic regime that has taken over the U.S. in this movie (and its source novel) is called "The Republic of Gilead". Gilead is a place (or maybe several places) mentioned repeatedly in the Bible (first in Genesis 31:23), as a geographic location and the source of a figurative or literal "balm" (curative or healing substance). Based on those constant Bible references, there is a well-known spiritual, "There is a Balm in Gilead", that is in the hymnals of many Christian denominations, and in the book, Offred remembers the hymn, and makes a joke to herself about it ("There is a bomb in Gilead").
Academic Reingard M. Nishick has written that casting of the lead central female role was difficult, until Natasha Richardson was cast after Sigourney Weaver withdrew from the film due to pregnancy. Nishick claims that "Director Volker Schlöndorff is reported to have approached almost every American actress to take over the part of Offred, yet every one of them declined." No explanation has been given as to why.