After starring in the most talked about TV show of the year, The Handmaid’s Tale’s Samira Wiley brings her own brand of cool to the high street’s must-have colour combinations. Photography: Andrew Yee. Fashion: Des Lewis.

If The Handmaid’s Tale has been the best, most important thing on TV this year (and let’s all agree it has), then Samira Wiley is the dystopian drama’s hero. As Moira, the activist lesbian in a world where fertile women are forced to become handmaids, she was brave and disdainful. While the fate of Offred (Elisabeth Moss) was questionable, there was never any doubt Moira would survive the brutal regime of Gilead; indeed Wiley is currently filming season two of the show in Toronto.

Wiley was nominated for an Emmy for her role (for outstanding supporting actress in a drama series) and Stylist’s shoot with her is the day before the awards. It’s her first award nomination, but she’s relaxed – perhaps because her mum Christine, who’s in town for the occasion, has come with her today. Between modelling the high street’s boldest new-season colour combinations – a contrast to the uniforms we’re used to seeing her in on-screen – she is humble and funny, talking of her dislike of wearing heels on the red carpet and how her wife is writing a new TV show, but has to go to a coffee shop to work as Wiley distracts her.

It was TV that brought Wiley and her wife, Lauren Morelli, together in 2012. Morelli was a writer on Orange Is The New Black in which Wiley – a graduate from the prestigious Juilliard School for drama in New York – starred as Poussey. They married earlier this year and Wiley’s parents, both Baptist ministers who live in Washington DC (“practically down the street from the White House,” Wiley tells me) officiated at their wedding. We talk about her career and how impressive it is that she has starred in two of the most agenda-setting dramas about women in modern times, and also the ‘coincidence’ that they are both from streaming services and make great use of flashback as a narrative device.

Samira Wiley talks love, activism and The Handmaid's Tale 2