SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “The Handmaid’s Tale” sequel series, “The Testaments,” now streaming on Hulu.
The first season of “The Testaments” came to an end Wednesday with its Season 1 finale. And blessed be the fruit, because Variety‘s got the answer to what is sure to be your very first question: When is Season 2 of “The Handmaid’s Tale” sequel series coming?
According to creator and showrunner Bruce Miller, “we’re writing the show, we’re breaking the season.”
There, now that you know that much, we can rewind to where we find Agnes (Chase Infinti), Daisy (Lucy Halliday) and their friends by the end of the season. For Daisy and Agnes, the answer is very much a “don’t let the bastards grind you down” attitude, per their stone-cold-determined walk with Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard) through the halls of Aunt Lydia’s (Ann Dowd) school for Gileads’ plums. Despite the fact Agnes has lost her marriage prospect and is back at school as a plum, and Daisy gave up her chance to escape out of Gilead and decided to go back in undercover, knowing that she is now a plum herself and will be ripe for marriage, they’re all in this together.
“When I see in that finale, those three girls walking down the hall, I get chills talking about it,” “The Testaments” guest star and executive producer Elisabeth Moss told Variety. “It makes me cry every time I watch it. It’s so inspiring, it’s so emotional, it’s so exciting. So the fact that we have all that, that we have them dealing with these gigantic stakes, and then at the same time, having everyday, normal concerns that a teenage girl or boy would go through is, that’s life.”
No one has ever been in Agnes’ position before, returning to the plum school after already moving into “green” status upon getting their period, and then being just steps from the altar with an elite commander. She sacrificed it all to get her best friend Becka (Mattea Conforti) into a marriage with Agnes’ Guardian-turned-Commander crush, Garth (Brad Alexander). She’s paying the price for telling her fiancé, Commander Weston (Reed Diamond), about how Dr. Grove (Randal Edwards) assaulted her (leaving her as “damaged goods” to a future husband) in order to gain enough sympathy from him that he would save Becka from her fate for murdering her father.
“For Agnes, she was the golden child, and now she’s a loser,” Miller said. “She was Agnes MacKenzie, she was like Chase Infiniti. She’s tall and beautiful and fantastic. And now someone dumped her, and no one knows why. We’re also trying to show in these worlds, in high school in general, those things ebb and flow. In high school, when you move from one clique to another clique, it can get you killed. So, I think at the end, where you have Agnes coming in, she’s saying, ‘Boy, I’m a loser, this has never happened before.’ But the next thing you see is her walking down the hallway, absolutely full of strength. So, it may never have never happened before, and I think Lydia is worried, but I think Agnes is going to make something out of this little bit of independence that she’s found.”
Agnes has also learned an important fact that is certainly contributing to that bit of independence: her mother is Mayday leader June Osborne (Moss). And though she didn’t come right out and tell Lydia she knows that, Agnes gave Lydia enough of a hint to show something has begun simmering in her.
“That’s what the show is about — it’s about the pot boiling over,” Miller said. “When she realizes who her mother is, that turns up the temperature of that pot quite a bit — but it’s still just burbling, it doesn’t explode. This is a woman who is raised in Gilead, those are her rules, she’s not going to turn around one day and say, ‘This is awful. We should change it.’ You really want her to become who is on a hot fire, bubbling away, but you never know when she’s gonna start to pop.”
Read more from Variety‘s interview with Miller and Moss about “The Testaments” Season 1 finale and Season 2 plans below.
Bruce Miller: She comes to the set, and it’s like Elvis. Everybody comes, and everybody wants to see her and touch her. People from the office are there, everybody’s there. And she’s totally game. She wants to put on the outfit, she wanted a line this time. She wants to do everything. She has lots of things that she could be doing that are very exciting, but she really does love it, and we love having her there.
And we had developed these new characters, this new class of women who were these prison matrons, and they just perfectly seemed to fit. Even the outfit seemed to fit her so well that when we told her that she was playing a new kind of character– I always thought she was going to balk, but she was totally excited.
Elisabeth Moss: I’m just glad she didn’t try to slap Aunt Lydia. I don’t think that would have gone over too well. I remember that she can land one.
Miller: You’re absolutely right about Becka, that she’s in what, on paper, is the perfect situation, or as good as the situation gets there. And that was the whole point. June was treated so poorly, she was a slave, she was pulled out of her life, she was taken away from everything that meant anything to her. These girls are feted, they’re at the absolute top, and what you’re trying to show is misogyny still sucks, top or bottom. They still don’t have freedom, they don’t have autonomy. And I think by moving Becka into wifehood, into a more powerful position, and showing that even at the top you can’t be yourself, even at the top you can’t be happy. The thing Becka for me was that we wanted to show the inside of that life.
Miller: I’ll take whatever I can. Unfortunately, she’s mortal and I do think we have to be mindful, but Lizzie is a working person, she has other jobs, other creative people she’s responsible for, and she has a family that she’s responsible for. So just because she has a week free, it is not my week to take. Understanding everybody’s life holistically, I will, of course, take her and put her on the show and use those scenes wonderfully whenever I get them.
Moss: That’s very, very kind, Bruce. On my end, I never feel a sense of anyone breathing down my neck. We have an incredible group of people who are so good at what they do. He has an incredible writers’ room. I did a lot of work on “Handmaid’s” for a long time — and Bruce was one of the first people that taught me about delegating as a producer, and how important that is. So, I will say though, I just had about eight months off, and that’s the longest amount of time I’ve had off since before “Mad Men,” so there is a sense for me of being able to have a little bit more juice in the tank now. Coming off “Handmaid’s,” I signed up for it — it was elective, but it was a lot. It was directing the last two while I had a child who was less than one years old. And then I was in post, and then promoting the show, and then going into “Imperfect Women.” It was a different time. I’m looking forward to this season being able to really dive back into that world again.
Miller: Well, we’re working with scientists to keep them younger, we’re depending on science. I think MGM and Hulu and Disney are all very mindful of the time space continuum, and the fact that no matter how much we want our young women, they need to grow up. So they’re mindful to try to incorporate that into moving quickly. It’s just hard to move quickly, and it’s a tough time for the business. It’s a tough time for them to make decisions and put deals together, and they’re doing the best they can.
I don’t want to work too fast and make it a shitty show. I want to work slow and make it a great show, and so I’m always fighting for a little more time here and there. Any little tiny incremental improvement you can make in the show, from the script to the carpet in the offices to any single thing you can make a tiny little bit better, that’s how the show gets great.
Miller: I made that decision early on. In “The Testaments,” Agnes and Nichole (Daisy) are never in the story together. They’re not in school together, she’s not a pearl girl, they don’t have any of the story that they have in the show. So I don’t want to tell the story of Daisy and Agnes not being together — that didn’t seem like an interesting story. I would have loved to make it work out, and Nichole does exist in the story, but it just didn’t work out timing-wise. You would have made a bad television show that was accurate, and I didn’t want to do that.
Moss: There are things that come up with making a TV show. For example, there was this question that Bruce and I had about the finale, about whether or not June knew where exactly Agnes was. Did she know that Daisy and Agnes were in school together? How much did she know? And I was originally stuck on, “I think she would know, because June knows everything. She’s all knowing.” But he convinced me, and rightly so, thank God, that she wouldn’t know exactly, because they hide her.
Of course they hide her, she’s pretty valuable, so they would definitely not want June to know where she was. So we buy that could happen. And he convinced me that it was because then we got that moment on camera where June realizes that Daisy knows Agnes, and it is so much more interesting to see that moment on camera on that dock than it would have been to — in a literary sense, that may have played great in a novel, to have her know something. But that you want to see on camera, you want to see the actor realize it. Sometimes there’s things like that we get to do. We actually get to discover things in a way that maybe in the novel would make sense, but I want to see the actor do it.
Miller: It’s very weird when you have the audience think, “Why don’t they tell us this?” and you actually said it out loud.
Moss: No, you want to see it! You want to see it. Unless you see it, you don’t believe it.
Miller: So I did try to keep that June is very much a mother figure and a protector to Daisy, and someone who has kept an eye on her growing up, so very much a mother figure. Where she comes from, we have a few ideas. It depends on a few things, but we definitely have ideas. And I’ve loved the conversation about it online. Oh my God, it’s been fantastic. People are so clever. I wish I could have kept the book exactly the way it was, but …
Miller: Oh, absolutely. Right now, she’s a child, and June is living as a single parent, or a shared parent, in Toronto. So she has this whole life, in addition to being a Mayday spy. But absolutely, just the idea that Agnes finds out that she has a sister, can you imagine? It’s one thing to find out your mother is this notable terrorist, it’s another thing to find out you have someone out there. So I think that it hopefully will be that we will have some of the elements that the book had, in terms of that realization and that connection, and the existence of a whole other half of your heart existing.
Moss: And we haven’t even gotten to the question of, who’s your dad? Of Agnes wondering who her father is. I mean, so much fun.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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