The saga of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale continues in The Testaments
When The Handmaid’s Tale ended last year, we already knew we hadn’t seen the last of the totalitarian regime of Gilead. While June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) found her place as a leader of the resistance in Canada, she had to leave her daughter Hannah, now called Agnes, behind. In The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel to her award-winning dystopian novel, we follow teenage Agnes (One Battle After Another’s Chase Infiniti) as she attends Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory school in anticipation of fulfilling the role of her life: becoming a dutiful wife.
While the audience is aware of the horrors facing women in Gilead, Aunt Lydia’s (Ann Dowd) students know of nothing but the world that has raised them to be polite and obedient. Sure, there is an occasional carceral punishment to serve as warning that any kind of rebellion ends poorly, but within the confines of their lives, there is even joy to behold. “In The Testaments, the girls have found a lot of levity, humour, friendship and trust within their dynamic,” says Rowan Blanchard, who plays Agnes’ friend and fellow student, Shunammite. “They don’t have any outside reference, so this world is very normal to them. And, because it’s normal, they’ve found what makes them happy in it.”
Yet there is a sinister undercurrent running through the narrative. “We even see in the trailer how the girls are running around, laughing and enjoying themselves and playing innocent games of tag. We then cut to hanging bodies right above them,” says Mattea Conforti, who plays Agnes’ best friend Becka. “While there is this lightheartedness, that darkness still looms over them.” And a young girl’s thoughts about coming of age don’t seem to change, even when you know that desires and acts outside of the societal norm will not be tolerated. “Becka is learning how to become a wife, but she is different from her peers in the sense that she doesn’t want to get married,” says Conforti. “She questions her environment and is hesitant about the whole idea of her fate one day becoming a wife and a mother and that being the end of her story.”
Becka’s relationship with Agnes also makes her — if not quite skeptical of the teachings of Gilead — wonder about feelings that fall outside the parameters of Gilead. “Her relationship with Agnes is so special because Becka has so much love for her romantically and platonically,” says Conforti. “Becka’s known since episode one the way that she feels about Agnes. She truly wants the best for her. She wants Agnes to be happy, but she also is struggling to come to terms with the fact that she feels differently for Agnes. And in a world where it is condemned to deviate from a heterosexual relationship, Becka is really struggling to come to terms with her own identity.”
Aunt Lydia’s girls may have no real reference point when it comes to life outside of their own environment, but as in The Handmaid’s Tale, there are plenty of characters that are aware of what came before. Viewers will be transported back to the harrowing days of the establishment of the Republic of Gilead as seen through the eyes of Lydia. In the present, we meet Canadian Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a new student at the school, who used to live the life of a normal teenager and is about to learn things about theocratic state that go far beyond her education north of the border.
And then there is Paula (Amy Seimetz ), Agnes’ stepmother, who in another life was a therapist. “What’s really fascinating about playing her — even though she’s following the rules within Gilead and she is a little bit of a stickler for those rules — is finding these moments to have a little flicker of an emotional memory of what it’s like to be outside of Gilead,” says Seimetz. Even though Paula is painted as an adversary to Agnes, Seimetz believes she has her stepdaughter’s best interests at heart. “She really is trying to tell Agnes how to survive and how to do well in Gilead, whether those things seem harsh or not,” says Seimetz. “That is what she thinks her duty is as stepmother, at this phase in Agnes’s life.”
It is the expert blurring of the lines between heroes and villains that Seimetz believes Atwood does so well. “She balances the very detailed, dark world, almost gothic details, with humour and allows each character to have a messiness,” she says. “Even when you’re the hero of the story, she’s really good at allowing you to have a very human reaction that’s messy — that your thoughts and your feelings don’t always align to hero-like thoughts and feelings. And that goes for the villains as well. Not every thought is a villainous thought.”
The same duality is applied to the overall tone of the series, which occasionally reads more like Bridgerton than it does The Handmaid’s Tale, says Seimetz. “There’s a lightness to the world of The Testaments, because we’re following the young girls being trained to be good wives. And the wives of Gilead, their job is to make everything beautiful — your house, your dress, your hair. It’s your job to be beautiful because the men deal with the dark side of life,” she explains. “In order to portray that — and obviously that’s a very hard thing to hold together — the show is trying to present that beauty of what the wives are trying to do, and what Aunt Lydia is doing with her school to train these girls to be great wives, but with this undercurrent of darkness, very akin to Margaret Atwood’s work. There’s a real tension and a sense of humour that goes along with that, that makes the show very enjoyable to watch — built off that great universe and world building that The Handmaid’s Tale did for multiple seasons.”
The Testaments, streaming Wednesdays on Disney+