How ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Set Up ‘The Testaments’ Sequel Series

[This story contains major spoilers from The Handmaid’s Tale series finale, titled “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and from The Testaments novel.]

Now that The Handmaid’s Tale has revealed its ending, a new tale is coming into focus: sequel series The Testaments.

Author Margaret Atwood and show creator Bruce Miller explained in The Hollywood Reporter‘s recent oral history on the Hulu series how Atwood’s sequel novel The Testaments, which published in 2019, set The Handmaid’s Tale series ending on a different course: The Testaments takes place after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale and centers on the young girls in Gilead who are training to be wives — and that includes Hannah (who has been renamed Agnes), the daughter of Elisabeth Moss‘ starring character, June Osborne.

Because Hannah is in Gilead when The Testaments will begin, The Handmaid’s Tale couldn’t end with June reuniting with her first-born daughter, which leaves the image of Hannah being ripped from June’s arms still searing in viewers’ minds after the May 26 series finale. Atwood had given Miller a small no-kill list midway through the series that included directives to leave June, her two daughters and Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) alive, the latter being the character who leads the next adaptation. Chase Infiniti stars as Agnes/Hannah. Nichole, her youngest daughter, goes by Holly by the series’ end.

Armed with the information of Atwood’s The Testaments, Miller, Moss, executive producer Warren Littlefield and season six co-showrunners Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang ended June’s tale with an eye towards Hannah’s story. In the series finale, June decides to go back into Gilead and never stop fighting for her oldest daughter. She leaves youngest daughter Holly behind with her own mother (Cherry Jones). Moss, who will be an executive producer on The Testaments, which is also created by Miller, hasn’t confirmed she’ll have an onscreen role. But Miller wants to keep that hope alive for viewers.

“She threw herself back and she couldn’t walk away from her daughter, so June is still doing her job. She’s still doing what she was doing in The Handmaid’s Tale [along with] Luke [O-T Fagbenle] and Moira [Samira Wiley] — they’re still out there somewhere ringing the bell to get Hannah back,” the creator of both series tells THR. “The beauty of having watched Handmaid’s Tale is that you understand there’s this huge operation of people who care who are out there and who are risking themselves to get to reunite with their children. So, is June influencing The Testaments? Absolutely. She’s out there. She’s out there trying to get Hannah back. Do we see her? I would love to see her. But let’s expand into how the people who survive are rebelling in all these different areas. It looks like Gilead is just rife with people who really hate it. So let’s see more of them.”

Atwood similarly remains vague, but fans the hope. “If you’re an underground resistance fighter, you’re underground — that is the point. Nobody knows where you are. Because if they do, you’re going to be dead,” she tells THR. “June is always there, but in the background. And she turns up at the end of the book, as you will recall.” [Read book spoilers here.]

But that doesn’t mean the adaptation has to follow suit. Miller has been developing The Testaments since 2023 and he’s approaching his second Atwood adaptation similar to the first. The Handmaid’s Tale series faithfully followed the book in season one and from there, once it caught up with the source material, Miller and his writers continued the story by using details from the book as a guide to tell the remaining five seasons.

“I went in[to adapting The Handmaid’s Tale] with the idea that there’s more than enough in [the book], and I think that’s been born out,” he says. “In season six we were still extrapolating from the book elements that were just mentioned or hinted at. The Handmaid’s Tale was still very much Margaret’s world and Margaret’s story, and The Testaments in the same way. We’re using Margaret’s box of tricks, as many of Margaret’s tricks as we can.”

The Testaments went into production six weeks after The Handmaid’s Tale finished filming, thanks in large part to Littlefield gathering the executive producers and their production partners at both MGM Television and Hulu for a meeting of the minds back in 2019 when The Testaments book was coming out.

“The premise of that meeting in 2019 was to say: Are we going to allow ourselves to ask, ‘What’s the 10-year plan?’ We had this amazing world. We were world builders, with the help of Margaret’s inspiration. So, how do we continue that?” recalls Littlefield to THR. “We said we’d do five, maybe six [seasons] and from there, we want to transition [to The Testaments], and that transition should be butted right up against The Handmaid’s Tale.”

When production finally began on the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, Tuchman and Chang took over as co-showrunners so Miller could pivot to developing The Testaments. Miller remained actively involved in the final season and wrote the series finale, which was directed by Moss. The final scene brought to life the full-circle ending Miller had always envisioned, where June ends the series speaking the words that opened the show.

“In the pilot episode of the series, we portrayed a Boston that was under military control by Gilead. And what we have in the finale is the joy and the success of the liberation of Boston. Has Gilead disappeared? No, it hasn’t,” says Littlefield. “So the fight’s not over, and that’s important for June. But there’s a sense of accomplishment and victory, and that our unsung heroes are rather heroic as we say goodbye to this chapter of our Gilead universe.”

The series leaves viewers with a victory in Boston, and the sense that the women who rose up notched a major win, including Rita (Amanda Brugel). “We wanted hope,” he adds of the ending. “Our characters are not from the Marvel universe. They are ordinary women who would rise up, unite and do extraordinary things. That is the thrust of the final few episodes of the show.”

The Testaments novel opens several years after The Handmaid’s Tale book ended. Since the series continued well beyond the book’s timeline, the gap narrows with the next adaptation.

“The Testaments in our world is four years after the end of our series,” Littlefield explains. “Aunt Lydia is really our only continuing character. Aunt Lydia has a school for girls to prepare them for womanhood and life in a Gilead world. What’s so fascinating is that these young women have never known a world that’s not a Gilead world. That’s completely different from our June point of view that always was our rudder for The Handmaid’s Tale. They’re also teenagers. So there’s a rebelliousness — there’s attitude about everything.”

If that sounds like mini-Mrs. Waterfords or Mrs. Putnams in training, Miller says they’re even worse. “They go from being children to being married, and so what you get are adolescent wives,” the creator says of capturing the experience for girls growing up in Gilead. The Testaments is described as a coming-of-age story that finds this new generation of young women grappling with the bleak future that awaits them. Facing the prospect of being married off, they will be forced to search for allies, both new and old, to help in their fight for freedom and the life they deserve. 

Aside from Infiniti’s Agnes, Hulu has released character descriptions for the rest of the Gilead girls and women who will fill out this world. There’s key character Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a young Canadian teen whose life is turned upside down when she learns of her connection to the Republic of Gilead; along with Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard), a pampered teen from a prominent Gilead family; Becka (Mattea Conforti), a girl from humble origins who attends school with Gilead’s elite and questions what she’s being groomed for; Hulda (Isolde Ardies), a guileless girl, full of excitement at the prospect of womanhood; Jehosheba (Shechinah Mpumlwana), a competitive classmate from a respected family; and Miriam (Birva Pandya), a girl on the cusp of womanhood who struggles under the pressure of marriage season.

Then there’s Paula (Amy Seimetz), wife to a high-ranking Commander whose perfect life is complicated by her new step-daughter, and Rosa (Kira Guloien), a caring and dedicated Martha described as a maternal figure to Agnes and a much-needed source of love in an otherwise cold household. Aunt Vidala (Mabel Li) is a stern disciplinarian described as the heir-apparent to the women’s sphere of Gilead, along with her right-hand Aunt Gabbana (Zarrin Darnell-Martin) and “cool Aunt” Aunt Estee (Eva Foote).

As for the one male character so far, a young Commander named Garth (Brad Alexander) becomes involved in the personal lives of the girls he’s sworn to protect.

Just like with The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments series is catered to people who haven’t read the book. “You should be able to turn on the first episode and enjoy it like a drama,” says Miller. “I tried to milk as much as I could from the book, but it doesn’t follow the story or the timeline [exactly] because The Testaments book takes place over a very long period of time.”

Miller insists that the adaptation shouldn’t be treated like “homework” where you have to read the books to get up to speed. “I hope there are wonderful additions if you have watched The Handmaid’s Tale, and even more so if you read the books. But part of my job to make it accessible drama. At the beginning of Handmaid’s, you see a woman running away from soldiers in the woods with her child. You don’t have to know her name or her story or where she’s from to know whose side you’re on and whose side you’re not on.”

And though Dowd is the only character officially confirmed to appear, he isn’t shutting the door on any Handmaid’s characters who are still out there in the show’s larger universe returning — except for one.

“Serena’s story really feels like the end of Serena’s story, that she is someone who’s never going to admit that she did wrong, but you can see [in her final scene] how holding onto the illusion that she did right is getting very, very difficult,” he says of Yvonne Strahovski’s character. Miller previously revealed that he heavily considered killing Serena, but was convinced by his co-showrunners to let her live. “I love Serena to the point where I’m so much more mad at her because she should know better,” he says.

Some context, however, does seem necessary for Aunt Lydia, who had an awakening in the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. Her final scene showed her working with the Mayday resistance to reunite Janine (Madeline Brewer) with her biological daughter, Charlotte.

“There’s the beginning of an epiphany for Aunt Lydia. She says words and deeds that we never would have expected from her and four years later [in The Testaments], she’s running the school. So, what happened?” poses Littlefield of the journey the sequel series will go on with Aunt Lydia, who will be working with the Pearl Girls: Aunts in training who have chosen to be in Gilead. “Part of that is about Lydia’s transformation that we’ll come to know and understand that she chose not to burn down the world, but to try and rebuild it through education, in a kinder, more refined way. But she is working from within. That’s an interesting journey to see whether Lydia can be successful in what she’s attempting to do.”

Dowd, who previously told THR she’s in her same Handmaid’s costume while currently on set and filming The Testaments, tells THR that she views Lydia’s sequel series journey as one of starting over.

“I’m wondering if she would look at it as repentance, which is a very, very good question, as much as it’s about her having a clearer vision of what the world is really like,” she tells THR. “She’s changed, no question. All that went on in the final season changes that woman for good. To be spoken to the way June spoke to her, those things stick and they stayed. She’s a different person, and it’s very clear she is in The Testaments. Things just landed for Lydia. They landed in her center and really shifted the way she sees the world. Certain things she believes in — God and helping, in this case, the Pearl Girls. Being there is very, very important to her. It’s her life’s mission.”

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The Handmaid’s Tale is now streaming all episodes on Hulu. Read THR’s comprehensive oral history on the series, mini oral history on the penultimate episode, and series finale explainers on June’s ending, Serena’s ending, Janine’s ending, Luke’s ending and Rita’s ending.