Chase Infiniti (right, here with Lucy Halliday) plays Agnes, June's daughter, in 'The Handmaid's Tale' sequel series 'The Testaments.' Disney/Steve Wilkie Logo text [This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the three-episode premiere of The Testaments.]
Praise be! The Mayday resistance movement — and the shadow of June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) — is alive and well again within the hallowed halls of power in the Republic of Gilead. Less than a year after the end of Hulu’s Emmy-winning adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s sequel novel, The Testaments, has been reimagined into another eerily timely TV series — this time centered around young women fighting for their own autonomy.
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Set four years after the events of the Handmaid’s series finale, in which Moss’ protagonist June vowed to continue working underground to take down the totalitarian theocracy that forcibly separated her from her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and their daughter Hannah, the first three episodes of The Testaments now reveal that June has found a new protégée to do her bidding inside the patriarchal regime: Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a Toronto teen whose own parents were killed by Gilead agents for working with Mayday.
At June’s behest, Daisy enters Gilead under the guise of being a “Pearl Girl” — a new recruit from outside of Gilead’s borders — at Aunt Lydia’s (Ann Dowd) elite preparatory academy, where she comes face-to-face with Agnes McKenzie (Chase Infiniti). “Agnes” is the Gilead name for June and Luke’s daughter Hannah, who is introduced as a “plum,” a young girl who will soon be eligible for marriage. Adapted by Handmaid’s showrunner Bruce Miller, the 10-episode first season of The Testaments follows the dual perspectives of Agnes and Daisy as they grapple with the bleak life of subservience that awaits the female population in adulthood. (The first three episodes are now streaming on Hulu.)
Having worked in close contact with Atwood for the last decade, Miller knew that the author was working on a sequel to her seminal 1985 novel long before The Testaments hit bookshelves in 2019, which was halfway into the Handmaid’s six-season run. When the time came to imagine the next chapter of Gilead, the veteran showrunner used the same approach as he did when adapting Handmaid’s.
“I’m trying to not necessarily take things in the order they happen in the book, but to take the big central elements and move them into a timeline that makes as much sense as we can,” Miller told The Hollywood Reporter during an exclusive visit to the Toronto set last July. While Atwood’s sequel is set 15 years after her Handmaid’s novel, Miller’s take on Testaments picks up only four years after the Moss-starring series. “We’re definitely trying to follow the overall story of the book, but the ins and outs of the actual storyline are difficult because characters are different ages, and we had to redefine the Daisy character to keep things practical in our world.”
In Atwood’s Testaments, “Daisy” is the name given to Nichole, the daughter of June and Nick (played by Max Minghella) who went by Holly by the end of Handmaid’s and was ultimately smuggled out of Gilead and raised by adoptive parents in Canada. But even though the backstory may be similar, Daisy is not Holly in this adaptation. Given the smaller time jump, “Holly would only be four or five,” Miller explained. “So in our story, because of the timeline, baby Holly, as far as we know, is safe growing up in Toronto… for now!”
While the sequel feels significantly lighter and brighter due to the younger generation and features an entirely new cast of newcomers to the Handmaid’s universe, the connective tissue between both series — apart from June, who surprise appeared at the end of the Testaments pilot and will pop up sporadically in the first season — is Aunt Lydia. In the final season of Handmaid’s, Lydia grew increasingly disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the ruling class of Commanders, who do not live up to Gilead’s religious ideals. Following years of causing unjust suffering on the handmaids she claimed to care for, Lydia was finally forced to confront her own complicity in the regime.
Elisabeth Moss made a surprise return in The Testaments; she’s here meeting with Daisy (Lucy Halliday) and reprising her role as June. Disney/Steve Wilkie By the end of Handmaid’s, Lydia publicly declares that her girls “have been prisoners of wicked, godless men,” and she privately becomes a kind of double agent looking to take down the regime from within. After Lydia bid farewell to Janine (Madeline Brewer) and facilitated Janine’s reunion with her biological daughter, Dowd told THR that “it was wonderful to see how the end of that series affected” her character, “whose behavior is quite different” years later.
“She’s doing work that doesn’t require so much control in a fierce way,” Dowd said between camera setups at Aunt Lydia’s new school, where there is a big statue of her character in the front foyer and a stern portrait of her in classrooms to create the perception that she is always watching her students. “It’s a gentler environment, and Lydia has more to do with how it’s running than she did in the past — not forgetting, of course, that the Commanders are in charge, ultimately. So it’s about working underneath [their noses].”
The young women at the academy, who are essentially being groomed for marriage, take all of Aunt Lydia’s counsel as gospel, before the cracks of adolescent resistance emerge in their behavior. “Lydia has been this role model in their life that they’re supposed to learn from and resemble as they grow older,” said Mattea Conforti, who plays reluctant “plum” Becka. “They don’t know that Lydia’s working for the resistance, but whatever Lydia says goes. If Lydia teaches them something, they’re going to interpret that and perform her teachings as they think they should.”
But Miller notes that just because Lydia has stepped into more of a “guiding” role does not mean that she is a different person. After all, Lydia “can sniff out a nexus of power unlike anybody else,” Miller remarked. “When she was the head of the Handmaids, she had this power of fertility. Now she’s at the place where she’s choosing young wives for all of the Commanders in the most important school in the country. This one is outside of Washington, D.C., so it’s all the fancy kids. So she has put herself in a position where she doesn’t have to do the bad things anymore, but she’s absolutely at the center of influence and power.”
Lydia still believes she has been doing God’s work. “She believes in her heart that when she was trying to save the world and save June and these other fallen women, she was doing God’s work. Now, she feels like, ‘Well, those men aren’t, but I still am,’” Miller added. “So even though she’s had a moment of doubt, she’s rebounded to who she is, which is very self-confident.”
Whereas Lydia was just one of many female characters whose lives were completely upended before the start of Handmaid’s, she is one of the only women in Testaments who has known a life before Gilead. By bringing Lydia back for the sequel, Miller, like Atwood, wanted the audience to learn more about what makes the polarizing character tick.
“We were very mindful of the fact that we are only showing a few peeks into her past, and what to show in those. We were also very mindful about the level of trauma that we wanted to put the audience through,” Miller said. “So when looking at the material in The Testaments, we wanted to make sure [the flashbacks] lined up with our goal of understanding Lydia’s mindset at the beginning of Gilead and why she made the choices she did.”
“Lydia was a school teacher in her previous life before Gilead. This is different from The Testaments [book] in which she was a family court judge,” Dowd said, teasing more of her backstory that will come in a later episode.
Ann Dowd reprising her role of Aunt Lydia in The Testaments. Disney/Russ Martin The producers, meanwhile, knew they needed to find young actors who could eventually go toe-to-toe with Dowd, in the same way that Moss and Brewer were able to over the course of Handmaid’s.
“Ann is a lovely, gentle woman and a great collaborator, but she’ll run over you with her talent if you’re not careful,” Miller quipped. He wanted to cast young women who “have a good sense of themselves” and “followed the grounded performance style” of the original series. “The hardest part in casting young people is that even if they have a lot of range, they don’t know it. So you’re looking to perhaps see something that they don’t even know that is blooming yet. And honestly, you’re looking for someone that when you see them, you forget that they’re acting and you get sucked in even during an audition.”
The key piece to that puzzle is Agnes, who Lydia knows is the daughter of June. “Lydia’s relationship with Agnes’ mother is a very complicated and strong one. There is tremendous love and respect for this woman. Her mother is an extraordinary woman who never, ever gives up — and what an amazing quality to have,” Dowd said. “So keeping an eye on [Agnes], making sure things are going according to the right plan for her — and keeping it under wraps as well — is hugely important to Lydia.”
Although Agnes does not remind Lydia of June per se, “I think that all the rebelliousness that Agnes portrays and can’t hold back this year is not a surprise to Lydia,” Miller joked.
Since Agnes has never known a life outside of her privileged upbringing in Gilead, “I really tried to tap into what it was like being 14, 15, and to bring that mindset and that excitement to life itself to her. [I tried] making sure that she’s staying grounded, but also staying very hopeful and youthful and bright in the world, because it’s hard not to be,” Infiniti told THR, just a few months before embarking on a global press tour for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning One Battle After Another. In the first season, “you will see Agnes be a 14-year-old and experience all the 14-year-old things and feelings and thoughts,” but “she is really learning that [her life] is not all that she was prepped for and expecting.”
Agnes begins to question the people around her largely due to her new relationship with Daisy, who Halliday previously told THR is “the audience’s perspective in Gilead.” In a flashback at the end of episode three, June meets Daisy at a diner and reveals the truth about Daisy’s adoptive parents’ connection to Mayday. After agreeing to enter Gilead on a revenge mission, Daisy unexpectedly develops an emotional attachment to Agnes’ inner circle of “plums.”
“Agnes and Daisy have this underlying bond that I don’t think can even be categorized by friendship,” Halliday said in her natural Scottish accent. “They’ve both had really unique experiences of growing up, but in many ways, their lives have mirrored each other. That friendship definitely transforms both of them for the better. Daisy changes her view on Gilead and her view on the girls because of her friendship with Agnes; Agnes’s walls come down a bit because of her friendship with Daisy.”
“The idea of [The Testaments] is, really, at a Thanksgiving dinner 40, 50 years from now, where you have Aunt Agnes and Aunt Daisy there, you want [someone] to say, ‘How did you guys meet?’ That’s this story,” Miller added. “Agnes is surrounded by people, but she really navigates [those relationships] well. She does not get that many people mad at her. She does not get punished. She’s very good at this, and so is Daisy. When you meet another person who’s an expert [like you], you start thinking, ‘Wow, what can we do together?’ They start realizing, ‘Maybe we can help our friends. Maybe we could expand our marriage pool. Maybe we could bring down Gilead.’”
As the two girls grow closer, Daisy also feels a gravitational pull toward Aunt Lydia. “I think they both know that the other has a lot more going on behind the scenes than what they’re verbalizing, and neither one is going to call the other one out, because it’s not going to benefit either of them to call it out,” Halliday said, likening Daisy and Lydia to two cats who “go in a room” and immediately start “sussing each other out.”
Daisy is particularly intrigued by how Lydia has managed to climb her way up the social ladder despite her gender. “As far as Daisy was concerned, Gilead was a really oppressive place for women. And don’t get me wrong: That certainly is very much the case,” Halliday said. “But to have this female figure leading people with such a command, Daisy’s certainly taken aback a bit by that. There’s an element of awe because even though Daisy is not supporting the things that Lydia is potentially doing or stands for, she’s definitely inspired by the leadership role she has.”
On the flip side, Halliday added, “Lydia’s very smart and she knows what she’s doing, and she’s very interested to see what relationship will grow of those two girls being placed together, knowing what she knows [about Agnes’ identity].”
Lucy Halliday as “Pearl Girl” Daisy with “plums,” including Infiniti’s Agnes The Testaments. Steve Wilkie/Disney The first season will also bring into focus Agnes’ fellow “plums,” Conforti’s Becka and Rowan Blanchard’s Shunammite.
“Shunammite asserts a lot of what can come across as a kind of mean girl confidence with her friend group,” Blanchard said. “She says what she means. She has good intentions, but she comes from a lot of money; her status is very important to her. She realizes she has to renegotiate and reinvent her space within her friend group because as the girls start growing up, she falls behind in a way. In the beginning, she wants to maintain her [position]. In girl friend groups, one of the girls is a bit more controlling, a bit more sassy, and a bit more precocious than the other ones. She does that as a self-protecting mechanism. But throughout the series, she softens a lot.”
While some characters like Shunammite really want to get married and have children, Becka, who comes from less wealthy parents, “doesn’t want to start her life,” Conforti said. (Becka’s father is the town dentist who gives each girl a check-up once they become eligible for marriage.) “As the show progresses, it starts to sink in more as a reality for her that this is actually going to happen, and her friends are going to grow up and get married and move away from her and start families.”
While the stakes in Gilead are much higher, The Testaments still functions as a classic coming-of-age story, in the sense that the young women are figuring out who they are — with the help of their friends — independently of what they have been told by the adults in their life.
“As we saw in Handmaid’s Tale, friendships are not allowed within the world. Especially in school, the girls are supposed to be very cordial with each other, and they have their greetings and salutations with others,” Conforti said. “But Becka and Agnes have this special relationship where they’re what you would consider best friends — or as much as best friends can be best friends in Gilead. These girls have such a special connection together because they have to grow up and they have to face reality so quickly and so young. They’re literally trauma-bonded together. There’s a certain camaraderie that would not have been able to have been formed without those circumstances.”
“Agnes loves these girls more than anything on the planet,” said Infiniti. “She has her family, yes, but her friends are truly her heart and soul, and she will do anything and everything for them. Watching that onscreen and also getting to portray that is so beautiful. You do get to see how powerful a 14-year-old girl is [alone], let alone when you put a bunch of them together.”
Miller said that “Gilead is so misogynistic” that “it makes them blind to the dangers that are right in front of them”: the next generation. “All that energy and intelligence and love for your friends and passion towards boys — they think they’re squashing all that stuff in Gilead, but they’re not squashing at all,” Miller noted. “They’re just redirecting, and it’s going to be there.”
The heavy subject matter aside, those tight-knit onscreen friendships appear to have translated to real life. On the two days that THR spent on set last summer, the young cast could regularly be heard giggling in between takes. During her down time, Infiniti would run around showing her older co-workers TikToks on her phone. That youthful exuberance is nothing new to Dowd, who pointed out that she was always the eldest main cast member on Handmaid’s.
“I remember sitting with the Handmaids in between scenes and setups, and I would be educated by them, truly, in the most wonderful way. Maddie [Brewer] would educate me on the current things, whatever was going on, and I loved being in that position. They didn’t make fun of me too much, just a little,” Dowd said with a glint in her eye. “But I love working with these young actors. They’re wonderful and excited, and they’re prepared and they want to do well — and they are doing well. They’re very respectful young women, and I have a great deal of respect for them.”
With an eye to future seasons of The Testaments, Miller confirmed that the debut season will “cover that first section” of Atwood’s novel “that would take place after” his version of Handmaid’s ends. Considering that he adapted almost the entire plot of Atwood’s most famous novel into the first season of Handmaid’s and then spun his own continuation of that tale for 53 more episodes, Miller is not concerned about his writers running out of material to adapt in this sequel series.
“With Handmaid’s, there was always stuff to mine. All the way up to the last season, we were mining pieces. Just the idea of the colonies, and the idea of Lydia’s transformation and what happens at the border — a lot of these things are mentioned in the book very vaguely, and we said, ‘Ooh, let’s take that seed and let it bloom,’” he said. “But this is Margaret’s world, and that’s the resource that we should be going to. She’s a very solid storyteller, so if we’re going to do something different than what Margaret did, we need a reason. I’m trying to [adapt] as much as I can because I think it worked in the book for a reason, not because I have general fealty to the book.”
Rowan Blanchard, Chase Infiniti and Mattea Conforti are among the next generation in Gilead. The Testaments creator Bruce Miller says, “They are a force that can change the world.” Russ Martin/Disney Like its predecessor, which became an emblem of anti-Trump resistance, The Testaments debuts during a period of persistent threats to women’s rights and ongoing debates over bodily autonomy. Given the current political climate in the U.S., expanding the Handmaid’s universe to examine the restrictions placed on the next generation appears to be the franchise’s most natural — and necessary — evolution.
“Because this show is [told] from several young people’s perspective, I really hope that there is an element of people being taken aback, maybe in a way that the Handmaids didn’t,” Halliday said, her voice growing more animated. “These children and these teenagers are the same [age as the] people who are going to be the ones who have to grow up and deal with the consequences that the current society is placing upon them. So, in a way, I hope that seeing a younger generation will offer people a different perspective and make them think more about the world that they’re creating on the outside.”
Infiniti added, “More than anything, I want the show to be viewed as a cautionary tale, because there are things that happen in the show and things that are happening in real life that are not far off from each other. In my hopes and dreams, I really would hope that this would wake people up to how scary [those changes] can be. There is strength in numbers and strength in unity, and I would love for people to take that from the show and use it towards real life, because the thing that is often lacking from the world is unity.”
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The Testaments releases new episodes every Wednesday on Hulu. Catch up on all of THR’s in-depth coverage of The Handmaid’s Tale universe here.
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