Actor Ann Dowd reflected on President Donald Trump’s first election win and remembered what her “Handmaid’s Tale” co-star told her over text message the morning after.

“He had just been elected,” Dowd recalled on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast “Dinner’s On Me,” Entertainment Weekly reported. “I remember when we were shooting early on... that night before he was elected, I remember thinking, ‘This can’t be. This is going in the wrong direction.’”

The next morning, she immediately texted actor Elisabeth Moss. At the time, they were still in production on Hulu’s hit series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel of the same name.

“I woke up, opened the door, The New York Times on the floor, announcing his win,” Dowd continued. “So I texted Lizzie Moss, and I said, ‘What are we going to do? This can’t be.’ She wrote back, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’”

That last line — which Moss wrote in Latin — is a famous one from the Hulu series. “Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum” appeared in Atwood’s novel as well.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” premiered just three months after Trump was inaugurated in 2017. The six-season series was set in a totalitarian regime where women, or handmaids, were subject to childbearing slavery.

Dowd starred as Aunt Lydia, who oversaw the handmaids; Moss portrayed June, a mother who tried to escape to Canada with her husband and daughter.

It became a timely sensation, used by political activists to protest the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The Hulu series aired its final episode last May.

In April, the sequel to the series, “The Testaments,” began streaming on Hulu. It follows two teens as they navigate Aunt Lydia’s prep school for future wives. Ann Dowd reprises her role from “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday also star.

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