Less than a year after ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’s’ ending, a sequel to the Emmy-winning series is here. ‘The Testaments’ will debut April 8. A classic coming-of-age drama set in the oppressive pressure cooker of Gilead, the follow-up series shifts the focus from the handmaids to their successors: the young women being groomed for marriage to the ruling class of Commanders at the preparatory academy. ‘The Testaments’ is based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name and stars Chase Infinity as Agnes MacKenzie.
A sequel to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
Showrunner Bruce Miller told The Hollywood Reporter, “This is a sequel to Handmaid’s Tale, the show.” This sequel is set four years after ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘s’ ending. The showrunners told the outlet, “There are parts of the (Testaments) book that take place very far in the future, and we want to save those things for far in the future; they’re goals we’re working towards. But there’s a compact bit of the story that takes place with the girls when they’re going through this process of finding husbands. That, as a core, is what we’re shooting for.”
The central storyline of ‘The Testaments’
While continuing to shed light on Aunt Lydia’s life before Gilead through a series of strategically placed flashbacks, the 10-episode first season largely centers around Agnes MacKenzie (played by star Chase Infiniti). “Agnes” is the Gilead name for June and Luke’s daughter, Hannah, who in this series is introduced as she comes face-to-face with Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a new arrival from Toronto with ulterior motives for joining Aunt Lydia’s academy.After Lydia asks Agnes to show Daisy the ropes at the all-girls’ school, the teens quickly begin to feel like kindred spirits. “Just making friends is very difficult,” Miller says, “so the fact that they do quickly fall into a trust relationship and rely on each other is remarkable, and something they both feel like happens so smoothly that they’re both a little worried about it.”In an early episode, viewers will learn through flashbacks the real reason why Daisy has chosen to enter this regime on her own volition. As Halliday plainly puts it, Daisy is on a mission: “She sees Gilead as this force that has decimated her life in Toronto. Daisy doesn’t even live in Gilead, and yet Gilead has been impacting her. She’s very much set on taking down Gilead, and taking from Gilead what Gilead took from women,” says Miller.As Miller likes to say: “There’s nothing in the world as powerful as a 14-year-old girl.”
Daisy will share a kinship in the girls of Gilead
What Daisy does not anticipate, however, is feeling a kinship with the other girls, whom she initially (and wrongly) assumed were “robots” without any crushes or dreams of their own. “The relationships are very much a wonderful byproduct of this venture into Gilead,” Halliday adds. “It’s not something Daisy’s looking for or even wants initially, but it is something that transforms her and her outlook on Gilead.”
