“I knew I never wanted her to lose her tenacity, regardless of how much she’s having to assimilate in Gilead,” Lucy Halliday explains of her character on The Testaments. Josh Telles/Deadline/PMC When Lucy Halliday walked onto the set of The Testaments for her first starring role — opposite Chase Infiniti and in only her third acting job, period — she had a couple of very strong voices in her head helping her along. The first was her character; in Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel, the 22-year-old plays Daisy, a Toronto teen turned undercover agent at a Gilead girls finishing school. “She’s such a gutsy person, and I was constantly trying to find that in myself,” says Halliday.
The second was James McAvoy.
Halliday grew up in Paisley, Scotland, a small town just outside Glasgow, where McAvoy is a true hometown hero, one of very few young(ish) celebrities local actors can look to as an example. She had just wrapped work on McAvoy’s directorial debut, California Schemin’, about two Scottish friends who reinvent themselves as a California rap duo (the film opens April 10 in the U.K. and is expected to arrive in the U.S. later this year). She says that learning from him — the notes he gave during shooting, the advice he had about character work, the way he comported himself on set — shaped who she was as a person and an actor by the time she arrived in Toronto to play Daisy.
Related Stories
TV 'The Testaments' Creator Explains That Thrilling Premiere Cameo: "You Want Those Scenes to Feel Epic"
TV When and Where to Stream 'The Testaments,' the Sequel to 'The Handmaid's Tale'
“Throughout The Testaments, if I ever felt out of my depth or unsure that I’d made the right decision about something, James was there to help me,” she says. “I truly believe I would not have been able to do the show if it wasn’t for my time with him.”
Still, even before The Testaments, Halliday had some of Daisy’s nerve. Her parents enrolled her in youth theater at age 8, after she spent so much time writing short stories and mailing them to the BBC that somebody politely suggested she might want to put all that energy somewhere else. “[My parents] were like, ‘Oh God, we need to send her someplace for a creative outlet,’ ” she says with a laugh. She immediately connected to the way that plays allowed her to get inside a character’s head, but says she was always set against professional acting — McAvoy aside, it wasn’t the sort of career path that anyone in her town thought of — and decided to go to medical school instead. “My mom was a nurse, and I was a nerd growing up,” she says. “But then as soon as I started, I was kicking myself that I hadn’t tried to do anything related to acting.”
Soon after her first classes, she saw an open call for auditions for a small, independent drama — and that was the end of med school. The film was a 2022 indie titled Blue Jean, and despite the fact that she had no representation, had never gone on an audition and did not fit the requirements for the job, she sent what she describes as a “very ballsy” email. “They wanted someone from Newcastle, in England, and who could play football really well, and I was like, ‘I’m perfect for this job.’ ” Halliday figured she could learn how to do a British accent and play soccer. She landed the part.
Her path to The Testaments was more traditional: agent, audition request, Zoom callback. The sides were vague in an attempt to keep the show under wraps — instead of Agnes and Daisy, the leads were named Andrea and Danielle — but Halliday was such a big fan of Margaret Atwood’s novels, especially her 2019 tome on which The Testaments is based, that she knew immediately she was being asked to audition for Daisy. In a final meeting with showrunner Bruce Miller (who also ran The Handmaid’s Tale), she pitched her version of the character. “I knew I never wanted her to lose her tenacity, regardless of how much she’s having to assimilate in Gilead,” she explains. “It was important to me because there are a lot of times when young women feel like we have to contort who we are to fit in, or shrink down, but we never lose who we are on the inside.”
The Testaments was a far larger production than she was used to. Luckily, Infiniti — who plays Agnes, the Gilead-raised daughter of June Osborne (played by Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale) — had just finished Paul Thomas Anderson’s big-budget drama One Battle After Another. “Chase taught me a lot about the power of advocating for yourself in a big working environment and about speaking up in general: that there’s no room too big for your voice.” With other young actors Mattea Conforti and Rowan Blanchard, they formed a little family of Toronto transplants, hanging out at one another’s apartments constantly and doing weekly debrief dinners at restaurants both trendy and ironic — “I remember Medieval Times being quite an important place for us” — that bolstered Halliday for the show’s more intense scenes. Though The Testaments is noticeably more fun than its predecessor, there are still hangings and torture aplenty; during a scene when Daisy is sent to The Corrections (which is just what it sounds like), the girls sang Wicked‘s “For Good” in between every take.
The new Testaments: Halliday (center) with Chase Infiniti (far right) in Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel. Disney/Russ Martin When The Testaments premieres April 8, the cast will be eagerly anticipating news of a second-season renewal. Halliday says she would happily do more, and she already has a few ambitions beyond the show: getting back to theater, this time professionally, or maybe playing her fantasy screen role of Merida in a live-action reboot of Brave.
As for what comes next, she isn’t especially picky. “I’d love to work with literally anyone,” she says, laughing.
This story appeared in the April 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
