Hulu’s new series, The Testaments, which follows up on The Handmaid’s Tale, has gradually been leading up to something that all Handmaid’s Tale fans have been anticipating for some time: to get a genuine and substantial understanding of Aunt Lydia prior to her transformation by Gilead from a person of integrity into the formidable enforcer known for putting fear into the hearts of the Gilead citizens.
Bruce Miller, the creator of The Testaments has now confirmed to fans that this is the direction of The Testaments and that they will finally receive a truthful and significant response to one of the repeated questions asked by fans over the years.
Speaking at the Deadline Contenders TV panel, Miller confirmed that a flashback episode focused on Aunt Lydia is coming, teasing,
“There’s a flashback episode with Lydia and she has a cross in that flashback with Vidala so keep your eyes open to see what the relationship was in the past. That’s all I’ll tease.”
That is a legitimately intriguing story point for people who have seen Ann Dowd in this role over many seasons and have been curious to understand how she came to this point. The presence of Lydia, in her youth, in the company of Aunt Vidala, a very cruel and strict figure at the school, indicates that the upcoming episode will examine very specific origins of the Aunts and the nature of the connections and the conflicts that existed among them when Gilead was first being established.
Ann Dowd, who played Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale for six seasons, is back for The Testaments and, in response to Miller’s statement, displayed an equal level of excitement.
“Yes keep your eyes open. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life working on it. I honestly mean that. A tremendous help in coming to understand Lydia’s beginning in Gilead. It was beautifully written.”
That is what she said, clearly unable to say too much but also unable to hide just how much the episode meant to her personally and professionally.
What do we already know about Lydia’s past and what makes her such a complex figure in The Testaments?
Aunt Lydia is a very interesting character within this entire universe because she doesn’t fit easily into any category as a pure villain or a pure good person. She has created something that has grown into a monster; she has acted brutally and coldly, but in the conclusion of the story, she has actually fought against the very system that she had helped to create and nearly lost her life while doing so.
Understanding how she got from whoever she was before Gilead to the woman who whipped and tortured Handmaids, and then back again to someone capable of conscience, is a journey that the show has only ever shown in small pieces.
In a Hollywood Reporter interview ahead of the premiere of The Testaments, Miller spoke carefully about how the show has approached the question of showing Lydia’s past.
“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. 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.”
One significant creative change the show has made from the original novel is Lydia’s profession before Gilead. In the book, she was a family court judge. In the television version, she was a school teacher, a change that makes her eventual role running an academy for young women in Gilead feel even more loaded and deliberate. Dowd herself confirmed this, saying, “Lydia was a school teacher in her previous life before Gilead,” and teasing that more of her backstory would come in a later episode.
What has Ann Dowd said about Lydia’s journey and how the cast of The Testaments is finding its footing?
In a separate interview with CBR, Dowd described Lydia as a “changed person” in The Testaments, saying that her “shame finally dissipated.” She spoke warmly about what the backstory episode gave her as a performer, saying,
“What I love is her backstory. You get a sense of how Lydia was before, the need for survival, and how that determines the course of her life. I think that’s really powerful. Now we understand how Gilead began. Working on that was amazing.”
The rest of the cast of The Testaments has also spoken about how much the show means to them and the genuine connections they have built. At the same Contenders panel, both lead actresses, Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday, talked about the real friendship that formed between them on set while playing Agnes and Daisy.
Halliday described her first week of filming as a “baptism of fire” since it involved working immediately with Elisabeth Moss, adding that by the end of that week, the experience had given her the confidence she needed to carry the show. New episodes of The Testaments drop every Wednesday on Hulu.
Edited by Sroban Ghosh