Chase Infiniti as June's daughter, Agnes/Hannah, in 'The Testaments.' Disney/Steve Wilkie Logo text [This story contains MAJOR spoilers from The Testaments season one finale, “Secateurs.”]
At its core, The Handmaid’s Tale — and now The Testaments — has always been about a mother fighting to get her stolen daughter back. The flagship Hulu series signed off after six seasons last year with that mother, June Osborne, played by Elisabeth Moss, vowing to never give up that fight until she gets her first daughter, Hannah, out of Gilead, the fictional dystopian nation that toppled America.
Now with the release of the season one finale of The Testaments on Wednesday, the sequel series adapted from Margaret Atwood‘s sequel novel of the same name has accomplished what the flagship did before it. Yes, the franchise is about June and Hannah reuniting. That’s what viewers want — and that’s what Moss wants, too. But it’s also about all of the people who need saving in the world of Gilead, and now June’s daughter, who was renamed Agnes when taken by Gilead, has realized that as well.
Related Stories
TV Elisabeth Moss Unpacks Major 'The Testaments' Finale Reveal -- and Expects Your Reaction
TV 'The Testaments' Star on That Violent Penultimate Episode: "She Spirals. I Didn't Even Recognize Her"
Agnes, played by Chase Infiniti, finally finds out that June is her real mother in the finale, “Secateurs,” which was co-written by Miller. But, it’s complicated. In the world of the Plums, who are the girls learning to be Gilead wives at Aunt Lydia’s (Ann Dowd) training school, June is a known terrorist who leads the resistance movement against Gilead. Viewers know she’s the hero, but Agnes and her friends have been told she’s the villain. Season two will explore Agnes and her friends’ awakening as they are empowered to fight and pick up June’s mantel, and Miller promises that viewers will, at some point, get what they have been waiting for after six seasons of Handmaid’s and now one season of Testaments.
“I am planning to get June and Hannah/Agnes together by the end,” he confirms to The Hollywood Reporter in our interview below. But their reunion doesn’t have to be the end — it could also be a new beginning, and even a chance to bring back more Handmaid’s Tale characters.
“It’s not just June and Hannah [reuniting after Gilead] — and it’s not even just June and Luke [June’s husband, played by O-T Fagbenle] and Agnes, but Nichole [June’s second daughter] is also there. And then there’s also Moira [played by Samira Wiley], who helped raise Hannah. Agnes has a whole community, a whole family outside of Gilead. So there is so much afterwards to tell about how that happens and how Hannah gets integrated,” he shares. “I hope we are making progress towards June and Agnes/Hannah getting to know each other as people now, so that when we do finally get them together, you feel like you’ve had a long time to understand and think about how that moment is going to be.”
Below, Miller dives into the season one finale to explain how Agnes will download this new information about her mother being June, how she’ll form a new alliance with Aunt Lydia, what that kiss between Agnes and best friend Becca (Mattea Conforti) means for season two, and what role June will continue to play as the show continues: “She’s almost the overlord of the whole universe,” he says.
***
Where are you now in the process of making season two?
We’re very excited and deep into figuring out what to do for season two. The writers room has been working for a while. Our younger actresses are younger. And no matter how much money you put into it, they’re not going to stay younger. Time does go on, and we very much want to stay on track to make this show as regularly as possible. I think our cast is astonishing, and I want to make sure we use them while they fit the part.
Are you toying with picking up right where you left off, or jumping ahead?
I always have plans to jump far ahead, and then I never do. And I think it’s because I’m always wondering, “Well, what happened in the interim time?” With The Handmaid’s Tale, you wanted to see every single thing June saw, so it didn’t ever work to jump ahead. But I have designs and desires to jump ahead a little bit, maybe some day, some season I will be able to. But 30 seconds later has been my usual. I’ve started with designs of 30 years later, and then it’s been 30 seconds.
You really set up a second season and beyond with this finale. Of course, you can never know for sure if you’re getting picked up. But how confident were you when writing this sequel series that you would get renewed, and do you have a multi-season plan you’re willing to share?
Well, you know how TV works. They decide on the number, but I have to plan out. I don’t think this particular story would be satisfying if it just faded away like other shows that get canceled in the off season.
But I do have a tidbit to tell you, which is that I am planning to get June and Hannah/Agnes together by the end.
So, if you think about that, I have a three or four season sense. But I know that if things go well and we have story to tell, I certainly can move that [reunion] forward. You never want to tread water, but in Gilead, there’s so much going on and it’s so complicated — and these actors are so good — that it really does not feel like the difference between three and four seasons would be that difficult for us to put our heads around. As long as Disney and Hulu and MGM and Amazon and everybody is willing to make the show, I’m thrilled. It’s exactly what I want to be doing. It’s beautiful, it’s meaningful.
Can’t the show also keep going even after you finally reunite June and Hannah?
Oh, absolutely. My daughter hates movies and books that end with people kissing. You’re like, “I waited the whole time to see what they were like together as a couple, and all I saw was one kiss and it ended.” So even if you get just a little sense of how June and Hannah would be, think about all these women who are going be together then. It’s not just June and Hannah. It’s not even just June and Luke [June’s husband, played by O-T Fagbenle] and Agnes, but Nichole [June’s second daughter] is also there. Nichole has a new big sister she’s never met, and Agnes has a little sister. And then there’s Moira [played by Samira Wiley], who helped raise Hannah. Agnes has a whole community, a whole family outside of Gilead. So there is so much afterwards to tell about how that happens and how Hannah gets integrated.
In some ways, the show is a refugee show. The people we’re seeing are either pre-refugees or refugees. The [Testaments girls] are now pre-refugees, but once they become post-war and are trying to rebuild America after Gilead, that’s interesting stuff. I don’t think I would have trouble coming up with stories about that.
June (Elisabeth Moss), at the end of season one of The Testaments, receives a note from Daisy (Lucy Halliday) about the resistance against Gilead to usher in season two. Disney/Steve Wilkie I just spoke with Elisabeth Moss, and she said you are now figuring out what her role will look like for season two, and if we will see her similarly to how we saw her in season one. What are your plans for how June will factor into season two?
Well, you know how I feel about Lizzie. I would have her just be there all the time if I could manage it. I love to have her in the show, and what we tried to do was to be practical and flexible in terms of her time. She’s a very busy woman, and there’s a lot of practicality in terms of schedule. But she is such a huge part of the show and the book. She’s this force operating outside. She’s almost the overlord of the whole universe. She is so much of the story. How much we see her is a question of how much we can get her, but how much is she involved in the story and how much is she out there influencing Agnes’ life? She’s the lever-puller in this particular story.
A big question I asked you in the beginning was if June knew she was sending Daisy (Lucy Halliday) to Aunt Lydia’s school where Agnes is, and we got that answer in the finale that June did not know Daisy was with Agnes/Hannah. You spoken about how, with these sorts of resistance movements, you don’t always know who’s on the other end of the line. Can you talk about why you wanted to keep that mysterious until now? And what does that mean about what June knows about Lydia?
Well, we did a lot of research on what these rebellion movements are actually like. We’re trying to stick to that scale where some people don’t know anything, and some people know a ton of stuff. June, ever since we’ve known her, and ever since she’s been outside of Gilead, has been throwing fish bait and trying to get some nibble on Hannah — and she’s gotten a bunch. They’ve tried all these things. Now she’s in contact with a group. She doesn’t know who they are, but they’ve been passing her information about the Plums, and they said, “Can we get someone in with that group?” And they did with Daisy.
Lydia knows who all those girls are, and I think she put them all together. She wants to protect them. But June has done this a lot of times hoping someone would end up next to Agnes, and they never, ever have. So of course, she hoped it every time, but she didn’t quite know where Daisy went. Pearl Girls didn’t exist when June was in Gilead. She had no idea what they were going to do. So I think this was Lydia and June not knowing, but working in concert.
It seemed in their final moment between Agnes and Lydia that there’s this unspoken alliance forming. Can you tease what that might look like in season two?
I think it’s the alliance that is unspoken in season one that becomes a little more spoken in season two. For Lydia, every time Agnes solves the problem or shows you how tough she is, Lydia is saying, “Oh, what a resource she would be.” Already, they’re starting to join together in making little changes in Gilead and not letting people like Dr. Grove [Becca’s father] get away with things. Lydia is starting to stop seeing Agnes as a child. She’s starting to see her as a woman with agency.
June still sees Agnes as a child — because it’s her child. As we move through the show, June is going to move to understanding her daughter better, and what she’s become, before she meets her. June should have expected her daughter to be exactly like Agnes is; she shouldn’t be surprised. But there’s a very interesting aspect to someone like Lydia, especially someone who’s been a teacher and an educator, to be able to deal with someone as a child moving into being an adult. I think she’s seeing the change, so she’s a little ahead of June in terms of the capacity.
You already said you will get June and Hannah together at some point in The Testaments. What do you say now to viewers who wanted that reunion by finale?
That’s the point. You want to see them together. That’s what makes you watch the next one.
But you did give us this great callback of Agnes writing her name, Hannah. How does this speak to the awakening Agnes is about to have now that she knows who her mother really is?
There are two awakenings. One is, “I know a lot more about this woman than I thought. Because I’ve been told a lot but in ways that aren’t really true. But I’m starting to tease them apart.” So the very practical “I remember my mother more than I think” is the first part.
The other part is that when Agnes learns about her mother, she learns things from her file; she learns what June was like in Gilead and what Gilead thought of her. She starts to get the nature of her mother, and connect with the nature of her mother. Also, the idea of seeing a picture of her mother. I don’t think she’s ever seen what her mother looks like. So all of that is just heartbreaking and wonderful, if you know that they got torn apart.
I hope we are making progress towards them getting to know each other as people now, so that when we do finally get them together, you feel like you’ve had a long time to understand and think about how that moment is going to be. Because the great thing in Handmaid’s was that everybody was waiting for June to get out of Gilead. She got out of Gilead in the middle of that season — and that wasn’t the end of anything. It’s never the end of anything. If you just had June and Agnes trying to figure out their life, what they’re going to do together and how they’re going to live, it’s not the end. You really want to have good stories when they end that create a new story.
The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments author Margaret Atwood made a cameo in the season one finale with Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd). Disney/Steve Wilkie The final scene of the finale was everything you’ve been saying since you started promoting the show: There’s nothing more powerful than a 14-year-old-girl. It was fist-raising and empowering to see Agnes, Daisy and Shu (Rowan Blanchard) walking away with a smirk echoing June. How much fun was it to nail that ending moment?
It was so much fun. These women — Chase, Rowan and Lucy — had been working together for so long that it’s the way they look at each other. They can act very silently but in a complex way going down that hallway. Shu was a little bit on another side of things, but showed how strong a friend she is. And Daisy was reviled by both of them in the beginning. Chase and Lucy have said in interviews: I don’t know what the show was about at the beginning, but now it’s about sisterhood. And the power of sisterhood and the power of friendship, and how friendship can bring down governments.
So when you get to this moment, I’m just trying to make sure it work in a simple way. As you said, look at them. They do not look like they’re going to be knocked down. I found it incredibly moving and exhilarating. These actors are breezy and funny, so as soon as they get past camera, they’re tickling each other and swearing in Scottish. They’re very much like Lizzie, where they turn it on and then they turn it off, and they’re just pretending to cry, they’re not really sad.
Those three are now in a very different position than Becca (Mattea Conforti). What can you tease about Becca’s storyline and how she opens you up to explore the life of a Gilead wife in season two?
The thing you have to see in this show is: What is the world of wives? And not for the Serenas, who chose to be a wife, but the Beccas and the people who are pushed into it. Becca’s is a bad situation that gets her into the marriage [after murdering her father and her mother taking the blame].
Wasn’t that such a good scene with the Becca and Agnes? The kissing scene is so wonderful. They’re so terrific. Getting a view into the worlds of wives is showing how they’re selling them a bill of goods. They’re telling them, “when you’re wives, you’ll be able to do X, Y, and Z.” But they aren’t wrong. When you are a wife, you do have power, and that’s what they all start to realize.
There is a scene very early on where one of the married girls tells Lydia, “You should probably leave now.” Because she’s a wife, and Lydia is an Aunt, and that’s the hierarchy. You see how quickly it shifts, and some of the girls love it. You get drunk with power immediately.
Mattea told me her interpretation of Becca and Agnes’ kiss in the finale. I’d like to hear yours. Was it a goodbye to an era they know they’ll never have again? Was it exploring deeper feelings they’d never acknowledged? How will it change their relationship for season two? [Stay tuned for that interview on Thursday.]
I don’t know that it’ll change their relationship. It’s more of a recognition and an honesty between two friends about where they are. I think it was Agnes being kind to her sad friend Becca. She was being comforting and lovely. There’s a lot of meaning in that kiss: Who leans in, who holds it, who smiles afterwards? How do they smile? I think they did it beautifully. I don’t want to tell people what I felt it was, but I think you could follow their thinking through with both of these characters, and it’s so wonderfully complicated because in Gilead, their friendship is so strong. It probably feels much stronger than romantic love. The men around them, they barely talk to. But all of these women are so close that you can understand why, when Becca imagines being married, she can’t imagine spending that much time with a man. She doesn’t have the experience, but she can’t even imagine spending the time.
With the kiss, Mike Barker was directing the finale, but those two women, the actors, worked it out themselves. I wouldn’t have shown it unless it really said something about their characters and what kind of love they have for each other, which is enormous. At the beginning of the season, you don’t know that Mattea and Chase are going to be Mattea and Chase. And then you get to the end, and you can write stuff like that. They just eat it up with a spoon. They trust each other so much.
Becca (Mattea Conforti) with Agnes (Infiniti) in the season one finale of The Testaments. Disney/Russ Martin It’s also exciting to think about Becca finding out about June, and her going headfirst into the cause.
All the girls are confused, because Agnes just found out that her mother is essentially Osama bin Laden. No one likes that person [since June is a known terrorist to Gilead]. But Becca, being queer in this universe, eventually realizes there’s no place for her. What do you do when there’s no place? You look at someone who was also in that situation, like June. June couldn’t exist in Gilead, so what did she do? She fought and she got out. That’s what Becca starts to feel like, and that’s the hard thing. She can’t exist here, yet all the loves of her life are here. Her whole life is here. I can’t imagine if someone plucked her out. She would be rescued, but so miserable.
We saw Handmaid’s character Rita (Amanda Brugel) return earlier in the season. Are you open to bringing back more Handmaid’s Tale characters for season two?
Of course. Having Amanda was so great, and we would bring back [all of them]. They all have such interesting bits of their story. All that stuff we found out about Rita, you similarly saw in the finale with June, where you also realize a lot of things about her life. She has a little townhouse and if you look really carefully, there’s a pair of little boots by the door — Nichole’s boots. I just love finding out that Rita and June have been on the road to being more and more okay. As an audience member, especially for someone like Rita, you think that’s a real victory. That’s a woman who had no life, who really does now have a life in the future.
Are you enjoying the response from fans after Testaments season one?
I’m thrilled and surprised. I’m so glad there’s this group of people who read the books in high school, but were too young to watch the show. Their parents didn’t let them watch the show, and they are now are watching Testaments and around that age. So it’s just wonderful. Lucy Halliday remembers the day that her friend brought The Testaments to school, and they were giving it back and forth and reading it, and now she’s Daisy. That’s insane.
***
The Testaments is now streaming all of season one on Hulu, and will return for season two. Read THR‘s show coverage here.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
