What To Know
- The Testaments, a Handmaid’s Tale spinoff, explores the coming-of-age struggles of a new generation of young women indoctrinated in Gilead.
- The premiere features familiar references and characters from The Handmaid’s Tale.
- The Testaments stars Chase Infiniti, Lucy Halliday, Ann Dowd, and more explain the premiere.
Welcome to the world of The Testaments, where girls raised in Gilead are brainwashed into ignorance about the realities of the outside world, but are smart enough to sense that there’s something they don’t know. The Handmaid’s Tale spinoff debuted with three episodes on Wednesday, April 8, on Hulu, and the first batch of episodes showed a side of Gilead viewers haven’t seen before while incorporating enough Handmaid’s Tale references to make the world feel familiar.
The Testaments cast, including Ann Dowd, Chase Infiniti, Lucy Halliday, and more, break down the premiere in our video interview above, including that surprise cameo from a star of The Handmaid’s Tale. Warning: Spoilers for The Testaments Season 1 Episodes 1-3 ahead.
Set about four years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale series finale, The Testaments is a coming-of-age story that finds a new generation of young women in Gilead grappling with the bleak future that awaits them. For these young women, growing up in Gilead is all they have ever known, having no tangible memories of the outside world before their indoctrination into this life. Facing the prospect of being married off and living a life of servitude, they will be forced to search for allies, both new and old, to help in their fight for freedom and the life they deserve. The show is based on the 2019 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name.
Infiniti plays Agnes, whom Handmaid’s Tale viewers will recall was the name given to June (Elisabeth Moss) and Luke’s (O-T Fagbenle) daughter, Hannah, after she was kidnapped by Gilead and given to another family. Agnes’s adoptive mother is dead in The Testaments, and her father, Commander MacKenzie (Nate Corddry, formerly played by Jason Butler Harner in Handmaid’s Tale), got remarried to an icy but intelligent woman named Paula (Amy Seimetz).
The One Battle After Another star tells TV Insider that Agnes has no memory of June.
“By the time the series begins, [Agnes] knows that June Osborne was a rebel handmaid,” Infiniti says. “It’s just that, and she’s this horrible person who has caused mass destruction. There’s never been a perspective of that story that has not had June as the enemy.”
Moss does, in fact, reprise her role as June in The Testaments. She first appears at the end of Episode 1, just as Daisy’s (Halliday) backstory is teased. The subsequent episodes from the premiere batch reveal how Daisy ended up in Gilead and how June was involved in that, in addition to revealing Daisy’s familial ties to Mayday, which she didn’t know she had.
Moss is also an executive producer on The Testaments (her voice can also be heard on the radio in Episode 1’s opening scene, along with Sam Jaeger from Handmaid’s Tale — Stephen Colbert plays the voice of the “Radio Free Boston” announcer. Infiniti and Halliday say that Moss gave them the freedom and support to develop their characters as they saw fit.
“She was very, very gracious in letting us create our own characters and giving us the permission and the space to play with them and embrace the fact that this is a new story in Gilead,” Infiniti shares. “She didn’t necessarily give us a specific piece of advice, but just having her support and having her blessing, in a sense, that was the best piece of advice that, I believe, we could’ve gotten.”
“I completely agree,” Halliday adds. “Her reassurance and her space that she provided for us to step into these characters and step into this world essentially shaped what you see on screen, because she afforded us that.”
Halliday and Moss had a lot of scenes together in Episode 3.
“I was very fortunate to share the screen with her, and that was invaluable for me,” the Scottish star says. “I remember watching her because she knows everything about this world and everything about Gilead, and I found that so admirable. I was very inspired by that.”
Dive deeper into the world of Gilead with Infiniti, Halliday, Dowd, Mattea Conforti, Rowan Blanchard, and Seimetz in the full video interview above.
The Testaments, Wednesdays, Hulu