{"id":382349,"date":"2026-04-09T01:16:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T01:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/382349\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T01:16:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T01:16:17","slug":"creator-stars-on-book-changes-june-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/382349\/","title":{"rendered":"Creator, Stars on Book Changes, June Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the three-episode premiere of\u00a0The Testaments<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

\n\tPraise be! The Mayday resistance movement \u2014 and the shadow of June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) <\/a>\u2014 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\u2019s Emmy-winning adaptation of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale, Canadian author Margaret Atwood<\/a>\u2019s sequel novel, The Testaments, has been reimagined into another eerily timely TV series<\/a> \u2014 this time centered around young women fighting for their own autonomy.<\/p>\n

\n\tSet four years after the events of the Handmaid\u2019s series finale<\/a>, in which Moss\u2019 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 prot\u00e9g\u00e9e to do her bidding inside the patriarchal regime: Daisy (Lucy Halliday)<\/a>, a Toronto teen whose own parents were killed by Gilead agents for working with Mayday.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt June\u2019s behest, Daisy enters Gilead under the guise of being a \u201cPearl Girl\u201d \u2014 a new recruit from outside of Gilead\u2019s borders \u2014 at Aunt Lydia\u2019s (Ann Dowd<\/a>) elite preparatory academy, where she comes face-to-face with Agnes McKenzie (Chase Infiniti<\/a>). \u201cAgnes\u201d is the Gilead name for June and Luke\u2019s daughter Hannah, who is introduced as a \u201cplum,\u201d a young girl who will soon be eligible for marriage. Adapted by Handmaid\u2019s showrunner Bruce Miller<\/a>, 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.)<\/p>\n

\n\tHaving worked in close contact with Atwood<\/a> 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\u2019s six-season run. When the time came to imagine the next chapter of Gilead<\/a>, the veteran showrunner used the same approach as he did when adapting Handmaid\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m 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,\u201d Miller told The Hollywood Reporter during an exclusive visit<\/a> to the Toronto set last July. While Atwood\u2019s sequel is set 15 years after her Handmaid\u2019s novel, Miller\u2019s take on Testaments picks up only four years after the Moss-starring series. \u201cWe\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Atwood\u2019s Testaments, \u201cDaisy\u201d 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\u2019s 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, \u201cHolly would only be four or five,\u201d Miller explained. \u201cSo in our story, because of the timeline, baby Holly, as far as we know, is safe growing up in Toronto\u2026 for now!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile the sequel feels significantly lighter and brighter due to the younger generation and features an entirely new cast of newcomers to the Handmaid\u2019s universe, the connective tissue between both series \u2014 apart from June, who surprise appeared<\/a> at the end of the Testaments pilot and will pop up sporadically in the first season \u2014 is Aunt Lydia. In the final season of Handmaid\u2019s, Lydia grew increasingly disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the ruling class of Commanders, who do not live up to Gilead\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tElisabeth Moss made a surprise return in The Testaments; she\u2019s here meeting with Daisy (Lucy Halliday) and reprising her role as June.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisney\/Steve Wilkie<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the end of Handmaid\u2019s, Lydia publicly declares that her girls \u201chave been prisoners of wicked, godless men,\u201d 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\u2019s reunion with her biological daughter, Dowd told THR that \u201cit was wonderful to see how the end of that series affected\u201d her character, \u201cwhose behavior is quite different\u201d years later.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe\u2019s doing work that doesn\u2019t require so much control in a fierce way,\u201d Dowd said between camera setups at Aunt Lydia\u2019s 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. \u201cIt\u2019s a gentler environment, and Lydia has more to do with how it\u2019s running than she did in the past \u2014 not forgetting, of course, that the Commanders are in charge, ultimately. So it\u2019s about working underneath [their noses].\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe young women at the academy, who are essentially being groomed for marriage, take all of Aunt Lydia\u2019s counsel as gospel, before the cracks of adolescent resistance emerge in their behavior. \u201cLydia has been this role model in their life that they\u2019re supposed to learn from and resemble as they grow older,\u201d said Mattea Conforti, who plays reluctant \u201cplum\u201d Becka. \u201cThey don\u2019t know that Lydia\u2019s working for the resistance, but whatever Lydia says goes. If Lydia teaches them something, they\u2019re going to interpret that and perform her teachings as they think they should.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Miller notes that just because Lydia has stepped into more of a \u201cguiding\u201d role does not mean that she is a different person. After all, Lydia \u201ccan sniff out a nexus of power unlike anybody else,\u201d Miller remarked. \u201cWhen she was the head of the Handmaids, she had this power of fertility. Now she\u2019s at the place where she\u2019s 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\u2019s all the fancy kids. So she has put herself in a position where she doesn\u2019t have to do the bad things anymore, but she\u2019s absolutely at the center of influence and power.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLydia still believes she has been doing God\u2019s work. \u201cShe 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\u2019s work. Now, she feels like, \u2018Well, those men aren\u2019t, but I still am,\u2019\u201d Miller added. \u201cSo even though she\u2019s had a moment of doubt, she\u2019s rebounded to who she is, which is very self-confident.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhereas Lydia was just one of many female characters whose lives were completely upended before the start of Handmaid\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe 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,\u201d Miller said. \u201cSo when looking at the material in The Testaments, we wanted to make sure [the flashbacks] lined up with our goal of understanding Lydia\u2019s mindset at the beginning of Gilead and why she made the choices she did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLydia 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,\u201d Dowd said, teasing more of her backstory that will come in a later episode.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAnn Dowd reprising her role of Aunt Lydia in The Testaments.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisney\/Russ Martin<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnn is a lovely, gentle woman and a great collaborator, but she\u2019ll run over you with her talent if you\u2019re not careful,\u201d Miller quipped. He wanted to cast young women who \u201chave a good sense of themselves\u201d and \u201cfollowed the grounded performance style\u201d of the original series. \u201cThe hardest part in casting young people is that even if they have a lot of range, they don\u2019t know it. So you\u2019re looking to perhaps see something that they don\u2019t even know that is blooming yet. And honestly, you\u2019re looking for someone that when you see them, you forget that they\u2019re acting and you get sucked in even during an audition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe key piece to that puzzle is Agnes, who Lydia knows is the daughter of June. \u201cLydia\u2019s relationship with Agnes\u2019 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 \u2014 and what an amazing quality to have,\u201d Dowd said. \u201cSo keeping an eye on [Agnes], making sure things are going according to the right plan for her \u2014 and keeping it under wraps as well \u2014 is hugely important to Lydia.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAlthough Agnes does not remind Lydia of June per se, \u201cI think that all the rebelliousness that Agnes portrays and can\u2019t hold back this year is not a surprise to Lydia,\u201d Miller joked.<\/p>\n

\n\tSince Agnes has never known a life outside of her privileged upbringing in Gilead, \u201cI 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\u2019s staying grounded, but also staying very hopeful and youthful and bright in the world, because it\u2019s hard not to be,\u201d Infiniti told THR, just a few months before embarking on a global press tour for Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s Oscar-winning One Battle After Another. In the first season, \u201cyou will see Agnes be a 14-year-old and experience all the 14-year-old things and feelings and thoughts,\u201d but \u201cshe is really learning that [her life] is not all that she was prepped for and expecting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAgnes begins to question the people around her largely due to her new relationship with Daisy, who Halliday previously told THR<\/a> is \u201cthe audience\u2019s perspective in Gilead.\u201d In a flashback at the end of episode three, June meets Daisy at a diner and reveals the truth about Daisy\u2019s adoptive parents\u2019 connection to Mayday. After agreeing to enter Gilead on a revenge mission, Daisy unexpectedly develops an emotional attachment to Agnes\u2019 inner circle of \u201cplums.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAgnes and Daisy have this underlying bond that I don\u2019t think can even be categorized by friendship,\u201d Halliday said in her natural Scottish accent. \u201cThey\u2019ve 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\u2019s walls come down a bit because of her friendship with Daisy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe 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, \u2018How did you guys meet?\u2019 That\u2019s this story,\u201d Miller added. \u201cAgnes 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\u2019s very good at this, and so is Daisy. When you meet another person who\u2019s an expert [like you], you start thinking, \u2018Wow, what can we do together?\u2019 They start realizing, \u2018Maybe we can help our friends. Maybe we could expand our marriage pool. Maybe we could bring down Gilead.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the two girls grow closer, Daisy also feels a gravitational pull toward Aunt Lydia. \u201cI think they both know that the other has a lot more going on behind the scenes than what they\u2019re verbalizing, and neither one is going to call the other one out, because it\u2019s not going to benefit either of them to call it out,\u201d Halliday said, likening Daisy and Lydia to two cats who \u201cgo in a room\u201d and immediately start \u201csussing each other out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDaisy is particularly intrigued by how Lydia has managed to climb her way up the social ladder despite her gender. \u201cAs far as Daisy was concerned, Gilead was a really oppressive place for women. And don\u2019t get me wrong: That certainly is very much the case,\u201d Halliday said. \u201cBut to have this female figure leading people with such a command, Daisy\u2019s certainly taken aback a bit by that. There\u2019s an element of awe because even though Daisy is not supporting the things that Lydia is potentially doing or stands for, she\u2019s definitely inspired by the leadership role she has.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the flip side, Halliday added, \u201cLydia\u2019s very smart and she knows what she\u2019s doing, and she\u2019s very interested to see what relationship will grow of those two girls being placed together, knowing what she knows [about Agnes\u2019 identity].\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tLucy Halliday as \u201cPearl Girl\u201d Daisy with \u201cplums,\u201d including Infiniti\u2019s Agnes The Testaments.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSteve Wilkie\/Disney<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first season will also bring into focus Agnes\u2019 fellow \u201cplums,\u201d Conforti\u2019s Becka and Rowan Blanchard\u2019s Shunammite.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShunammite asserts a lot of what can come across as a kind of mean girl confidence with her friend group,\u201d Blanchard said. \u201cShe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile some characters like Shunammite really want to get married and have children, Becka, who comes from less wealthy parents, \u201cdoesn\u2019t want to start her life,\u201d Conforti said. (Becka\u2019s father is the town dentist who gives each girl a check-up once they become eligible for marriage.) \u201cAs 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile 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 \u2014 with the help of their friends \u2014 independently of what they have been told by the adults in their life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAs we saw in Handmaid\u2019s 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,\u201d Conforti said. \u201cBut Becka and Agnes have this special relationship where they\u2019re what you would consider best friends \u2014 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\u2019re literally trauma-bonded together. There\u2019s a certain camaraderie that would not have been able to have been formed without those circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAgnes loves these girls more than anything on the planet,\u201d said Infiniti. \u201cShe 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<\/a> [alone], let alone when you put a bunch of them together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMiller said that \u201cGilead is so misogynistic\u201d that \u201cit makes them blind to the dangers that are right in front of them\u201d: the next generation. \u201cAll that energy and intelligence and love for your friends and passion towards boys \u2014 they think they\u2019re squashing all that stuff in Gilead, but they\u2019re not squashing at all,\u201d Miller noted. \u201cThey\u2019re just redirecting, and it\u2019s going to be there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI 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\u2019t make fun of me too much, just a little,\u201d Dowd said with a glint in her eye. \u201cBut I love working with these young actors. They\u2019re wonderful and excited, and they\u2019re prepared and they want to do well \u2014 and they are doing well. They\u2019re very respectful young women, and I have a great deal of respect for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith an eye to future seasons of The Testaments, Miller confirmed that the debut season will \u201ccover that first section\u201d of Atwood\u2019s novel \u201cthat would take place after\u201d his version of Handmaid\u2019s ends. Considering that he adapted almost the entire plot of Atwood\u2019s most famous novel into the first season of Handmaid\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWith Handmaid\u2019s, 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\u2019s transformation and what happens at the border \u2014 a lot of these things are mentioned in the book very vaguely, and we said, \u2018Ooh, let\u2019s take that seed and let it bloom,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cBut this is Margaret\u2019s world, and that\u2019s the resource that we should be going to. She\u2019s a very solid storyteller, so if we\u2019re going to do something different than what Margaret did, we need a reason. I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRowan Blanchard, Chase Infiniti and Mattea Conforti are among the next generation in Gilead. The Testaments creator Bruce Miller says, \u201cThey are a force that can change the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRuss Martin\/Disney<\/p>\n

\n\tLike its predecessor, which became an emblem of anti-Trump resistance<\/a>, The Testaments debuts during a period of persistent threats to women\u2019s rights and ongoing debates over bodily autonomy. Given the current political climate in the U.S., expanding the Handmaid\u2019s universe to examine the restrictions placed on the next generation appears to be the franchise\u2019s most natural \u2014 and necessary \u2014 evolution.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBecause this show is [told] from several young people\u2019s perspective, I really hope that there is an element of people being taken aback, maybe in a way that the Handmaids didn\u2019t,\u201d Halliday said, her voice growing more animated. \u201cThese 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\u2019re creating on the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tInfiniti added, \u201cMore 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Testaments releases new episodes every Wednesday on Hulu. Catch up on all of THR\u2019s in-depth coverage of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale universe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the three-episode premiere of\u00a0The Testaments.] Praise be! The Mayday resistance movement \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[170747,181173,19814,146,85,46,71303,112955,118152],"class_list":{"0":"post-382349","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-ann-dowd","9":"tag-bruce-miller","10":"tag-chase-infiniti","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-margaret-atwood","15":"tag-the-handmaids-tale","16":"tag-the-testaments"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}