The Handmaid’s Tale sequel series, The Testaments, arrives on Hulu this April, and according to series creator Bruce Miller, it is telling a fundamentally different story from the one that made the original so harrowing.
Where The Handmaid’s Tale put audiences at the very bottom of Gilead’s brutal social hierarchy, The Testaments flips the lens entirely. After the show’s world premiere, Bruce Miller talked to Variety at the French fest Series Mania about how Gilead will change as he stated,
“It was very exciting to see this other side of Gilead, with all these privileged people. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was about those at the very bottom of the social structure. Here are the women who are at the absolute top. And it still kind of sucks.”
At the centre of it all is Aunt Lydia, played again by the formidable Ann Dowd, now running an elite preparatory school for future wives and daughters of Commanders and many of these girls were taken from their birth parents. Dowd described Lydia at this point in the story as coming from a “very crushed place,” a woman brought to her knees by remorse and forced to reckon with everything she has done.
Dowd further added how Lydia will change as she continued,
“As Bruce said, it’s a different world entirely. And Lydia is a different person. She was brought to her knees, literally, in deep and profound remorse. When that happens, you can say: ‘I don’t care. I will keep doing what I’m doing.’ Or you can change the way you see the world, acknowledge what you have done, live with the pain and the misery of that, and begin a new life.”
More details about The Testaments
The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, lands on Hulu on April 8, with the first three episodes dropping together before settling into a weekly release schedule.
Set 15 years after the events of the original series, the show follows three women whose lives become tangled as they dig into Gilead’s secrets and the resistance fighting against it. Ann Dowd returns as Aunt Lydia, joined by Chase Infiniti as Agnes and Lucy Halliday as Daisy, joining Rowan Blanchard who stars as Shunammite.
With Mike Barker directing the opening episodes and the full creative team from the original back on board, The Testaments has everything in place to be a worthy follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale.
Edited by Nibir Konwar