A New Wrinkle in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: ‘The Testaments’ Showrunner Highlights the Powerful Friendship of Girls

The tidy purple outfits and headband-tucked hair can’t hide the giddiness or turmoil of the adolescent girls in The Testaments. They interlock pinkies walking to class and spill secrets in the restroom. Whisper about the sniping aunts who teach them. Confide about crushes and who’s gotten her period, and literally surround anyone too racked with disappointment to stand alone.

A sequel to Hulu’s Primetime Emmy-winning series The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is based on Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel and continues the story of women subjugated in Gilead, a patriarchal totalitarian theocracy where the United States used to be. Instead of following women thrust into new roles under this dystopian rule, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments focuses largely on the next generation—indoctrinated young yet discovering anyway how much this society limits them.

“What does Gilead do when they’re actually trying to do their best? It’s still horrible,” said creator Bruce Miller, who also was a showrunner on The Handmaid’s Tale. “[But] I don’t think you realize right away how horrible it is when you’re in an elevated position.”

Here, Miller talks about working with Atwood a second time and how the young adult angle energized the story—or as one character notes, “Nothing is more powerful than a teenage girl.”

The Testaments recently wrapped its ten-episode first season on Hulu with an 87% “fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.com. Critics have praised it as “an unexpectedly powerful coming-of-age tale.” Variety noted it’s an “exemplary follow-up” of “girlhood, survival, rage and friendship … that draws terrifying parallels to the modern-day experiences of women living in a misogynistic society emboldened by religious psychosis.”

Miller said he “certainly wasn’t presumptuous enough” to imagine helming a sequel while working on The Handmaid’s Tale, which adapted Atwood’s 1985 award-winning novel and ran for six seasons, from 2017 to 2015. But around 2017, Atwood told him she was noodling around with a few ideas. While the showrunners had gone beyond the plot of Atwood’s initial book by that show’s end, “she sort of told me whom not to kill and that sort of thing.”

When The Handmaid’s Tale ended, protagonist June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss), a former red-robed “Handmaid” ceremoniously raped to bear children, had become part of the underground resistance, killing several Gilead commanders in the War of Massachusetts and returning part of the country to normalcy. The Testaments picks up four years later.

Its key character is Agnes (Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another), who starts the story as a “Plum,” a teen who hasn’t hit puberty. Once biology kicks in, she becomes a “Green” at her premarital prep school, ready for a ball of potential suitors and an arranged marriage.

Viewers—and a few characters—figure out that, as in the book, Agnes is June’s daughter Hannah, who was ripped from June’s arms in The Handmaid’s Tale series premiere as they tried to flee the country. At the show’s start, she has warm memories of times with the commander and his late wife who adopted her.

“I just thought it was the most natural story,” Miller said. We know what happened to June after she lost Hannah. “This is the other side of that.”

Agnes harbors a crush for her family’s bodyguard, Garth (Brad Alexander), and a cache of treasured knickknacks, scraps of the old world about which she likes to craft stories. Her occasional voiceover mixes relatable anxiety and misgivings with attitude. ”I was a precious flower,” she muses at one point. “Then why did I sometimes feel like a prized pig?”

The school assigns Agnes to mentor Daisy (Lucy Halliday, California Schemin’), a Canadian immigrant called a “Pearl Girl,” or someone who joins Gilead as a religious convert. Unknown to Agnes, Daisy is a spy for Mayday, the resistance group with which June still works. Finding Gilead’s practices laughable when not frightening, like displaying hanged “gender traitors” or accused rapists, Daisy nevertheless warms to her new friends, including Becka (Mattea Conforti), Agnes’s longtime bestie who secretly likes girls; the guileless Hulda (Isolde Ardies); and the blunt Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard), whose cattiness camouflages her fear that everyone else will mature without her.

Handmaid’s Tale viewers will recognize the school’s headmaster, Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), who mercilessly tortured June throughout the original series. Yet like its book, The Testaments fleshes out Lydia’s backstory, showing how and why she became aligned with Gilead’s rulers—and how she subtly tries to help the girls under her care.

“What they don’t know yet is that life is long,” Lydia says in one voiceover. “The real brutality is when it asks you to endure knowing what you have done and what has been done while you stood by.”

Though the Plums seem privileged, they’re respected only for their promise: marriage and children. Classes involve embroidery, making and pouring tea, and other dainty niceties, no writing, reading, science, or debate. They’re arranged to marry often much-older Commanders, or men of authority, and the merest whiff of scandal can make one of them a “fallen woman,” with a broken engagement or, worse, cast aside to be a maid-like Martha or a Handmaid.

“The book had this cool central core of these girls growing up, with these relatable teenage problems, but set against a horribly oppressive background,” Miller said. “They [Gilead’s authorities] don’t want them to be friends. They’re incredible friends. They don’t want them to dream big. They dream big all the time.”

Even though many of them don’t know about a life beyond Gilead, their self-awareness fuels their independence and sense of justice.

As Miller put it, “June never expected to be happy, to survive. These girls expect the world.”

Although figures like Aunt Vidala (Mabel Li) seem especially strict, The Testaments extends them and some of the other women in the power structure a measure of compassion. Daisy is struck by how blue one aunt’s eyes are at one point when the woman begs for her forgiveness, and the girls’ mothers are often on tenterhooks, with the wrong decor, a scorched side dish, or an improper question from their daughters a sign of their failure as women.

Agnes might clash with her social-climbing stepmother (Amy Seimetz), but the system is the main antagonist. “The system is so pervasive,” Miller says. “I just think it’s interesting to see how far off [Gilead’s leaders] are in how they treat women. There’s nothing that happens in The Testaments that doesn’t happen to young women somewhere in the world. … Almost inevitably, it’s something I haven’t thought of.”

The ensemble has such strong performances, in part because the writers wanted to give the talented group plenty to do, Miller said. The scripts also ensure no one stays on the sidelines for long.

“You set it up at the beginning that they have these interesting personalities, jobs, interests … So you don’t have to try to get them together—they’re always together,” he said. “Make sure those atoms are rubbing together and creating heat.”

Like any adaptation, The Testaments takes some liberties with the source material. It expands Agnes’s time as a teenager, covering a longer period of Gilead history.

It also changes Daisy’s background: In the book, she turns out to be Nicole, the daughter June had while serving as a handmaid. In the series, Daisy is the same age as Agnes, heightening her role as a spy and allowing the writers to create a sisterly friendship instead.

“There’s a lot more colors and angles,” Miller said, adding that Atwood, who has a cameo appearance in The Testaments, supported this “collective vision.” She treats the cast and crew as, “You’re an artist taking my thing and running with it. Have fun.”

That’s a perspective to adopt whenever working with an adaptation.

“I was very comfortable with writing a companion that would steer people toward the book,” he said. “Don’t try to replace the book. Add and expand and take some chances. The book will always be there.”

Season One of The Testaments is now streaming on Hulu.