In the halls of Aunt Lydia’s premarital preparatory academy, young teens Agnes and Daisy will form a bond that will up-end their past, present and future.
That’s the premise of the new television series The Testaments, based on Canadian author Margaret Atwood‘s novel of the same name, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
While The Handmaid’s Tale was about the totalitarian regime of Gilead, which stripped women of their rights during a global fertility crisis, the sequel focuses on the young women being groomed for marriage in Gilead at the elite preparatory school.
Shechinah Mpumlwana, Rowan Blanchard, Birva Pandya, Mattea Conforti, Chase Infiniti and Isolde Ardies in The Testaments.
Supplied / Disney+
The future wives are stewarded by Aunt Lydia, a role reprised by actress Ann Dowd.
Obedience is brutally enforced at the school, and always with divine justification.
Dowd tells ABC News that The Handmaid’s Tale finale sets Aunt Lydia up to evolve from a divisive and ruthless disciplinarian to someone who accepts the horrific reality of the role she played in Gilead.
Aunt Lydia’s focus in The Testaments switches from the handmaids — fertile women enslaved by the totalitarian Republic of Gilead to bear children for elite, infertile couples — to the young daughters of high-ranking commanders, known as Plums, and Gilead missionaries, or aunts-in-training, known as Pearl Girls.
Ann Dowd in The Testaments.
Supplied / Disney+
“At the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, she has been brought to her hands and knees begging for forgiveness and really choosing to see what June Osborne points out to her, and not trying to say, ‘No, I didn’t do that. That wasn’t my fault,'” Dowd says.
“She hears it. She’s destroyed by it. She’s deeply humiliated and shamed at what she participated in.
“These are girls that she loved, and yet she did that to those girls, allowed it to happen.
“I think when you have that shoved in front of you, and you choose to see it, there’s a kind of collapse that occurs.”
Chase Infiniti in The Testaments.
Supplied / Disney+
Dowd says Aunt Lydia has a gentler countenance in The Testaments.
“I think that’s who we see, a gentler, kinder soul, one who was more vulnerable, someone who has gone through a deep change,” she says.
“I think that’s who we’re seeing in the Testaments.”
The Testaments is a coming-of-age story set in Gilead, and while the 2019 novel was set 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV series is set just four years later.
The first season is largely centred around Agnes MacKenzie (Chase Infiniti). Agnes is the Gilead name for June and Luke’s daughter, Hannah.
“Agnes is Hannah, years later, having grown up in the home of commanders, high-end commanders,” Dowd says.
Infiniti shot to fame after a starring role in One Battle After Another alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, with her star certain to rise even further with her performance as the pious and dutiful Agnes.
Aunt Lydia pairs Agnes with Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a Pearl Girl from Toronto who has ulterior motives for joining the academy.
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The eerie echoes of real life
The Testaments arrives on our screens at a time of global turmoil, much like The Handmaid’s Tale did.
“Margaret Atwood is astonishing,” Dowd says.
“She’s been called a prophet, and she pushes right back. [She says] ‘No, no. Everything I write, I got from history. It’s not from the future. I’m not telling the future.’
“She’s just remarkable in her ability to assess what is going on around her.”
With the overturning of Roe v Wade and the loss of bodily autonomy in some US states, Dowd points to echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments creeping into real life.
“Can you imagine having a society in which there was no reading and writing for women?” Dowd asks.
“Just, you know, becoming a good wife to serve your husband, to raising beautiful children, having a nice family home, that that was all that you had to work on.
“Your world was that big.
She tells an anecdote from her days on The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I remember right early on when we were shooting The Handmaid’s Tale, when Trump was elected, and I remember the night before going to bed because I couldn’t stand to watch another minute of someone saying Trump was going to win,” she says.
“And I got up the next morning, opened the door, and the newspaper, in The New York Times, had Trump.
“And I remember texting [Elisabeth Moss] … and I said, ‘Lizzie, what are we going to do?’ And she said, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ And she wrote it to me in Latin.
“And it just struck me as, ‘Oh, yes, you are right.’
The first three episodes of The Testaments are available on Disney+.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand