‘The Testaments’ Creator Bruce Miller Gives Updates On ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Sequel Series
The end of Hulu‘s The Handmaid’s Tale is nigh, but the story of Gilead will continue in the upcoming sequel series The Testaments, which creator Bruce Miller tells Deadline is in the casting phase and will give a very different perspective on the oppressive nation.
Based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, The Testaments will take place several years after the events of the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. The story follows the lives of three women, Aunt Lydia (Anne Dowd), Agnes and Daisy, whose fates become intertwined as they uncover the secrets of Gilead and the resistance against its regime.
“It’s about growing up Gilead. It feels like exactly the opposite world. These are…the most precious girls in Gilead,” Miller teased. “And yet you start to realize they’re walking a plank as well, just like the Handmaids. Hannah has to deal with the June inside of her [and] all of a sudden she starts to feel mighty, mighty, mighty rebellious.”
Avid Handmaid’s Tale viewers will know that Agnes is Gilead’s given name for June and Luke’s daughter Hannah, who as of Season 6 is training to become a Wife. There are still some key story beats that need to play out in order to get these characters from where they currently stand in the original series to where they’ll be when we pick up with them in The Testaments.
Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia, for example, is still trying to play by the rules while simultaneously protecting her Handmaids from the horrors that she’s become more and more sensitive to over the last few seasons. But, in The Testaments, she’ll be an instrumental part of the rebellion.
“It is very different for her this season, because she has she’s trying to expand her power. She’s trying to work her power in other places, places that are not just with the Handmaids, but the wider world,” Miller says of the character’s Season 6 arc. “Lydia is trying to do a very difficult job well, and I think she realizes over time that these girls are valuable on their own and is trying to kind of figure out a way to do her job that she’s said ‘I’m going to do,’ and also recognize the humanity of these girls that she can’t quite ignore.”
Pivotal to her development this season will be her struggle for control, even as it is seemingly slipping further away from her.
“I think that her level of control is kind of getting sapped by herself. She’s undercutting herself and saying, ‘I want to control these women, but I can’t, because I feel like that’s wrong,’ and she’s a very right and wrong person,” Miller explains. “But I think that what she does, what this season brings her to, is the idea that that — what happens to someone who enjoys control when they realize they have nothing? They don’t just fold under. What happens as we move forward and as we move into The Testaments is she tries to get more control.”
He continued: “What becomes someone like Lydia, who has not just desire to be in control, but confidence and actual competence in being in control? What happens to someone like that? Well, they don’t just sit by the wayside. They actually, if you tell them no and beat them up, they take your country.”
