Are you ready to return to Gilead?
Chase Infiniti, Ann Dowd and Lucy Halliday marched down a purple carpet at the Academy Museum on Tuesday evening to celebrate the world premiere of The Testaments, Hulu’s follow-up series to The Handmaid’s Tale.
Set four years after the Handmaid’s Tale series finale, The Testaments follows Infiniti’s Agnes and Halliday’s Daisy as they navigate coming of age in Gilead.
The show is Infiniti’s first project after her star-making turn in One Battle After Another, and she said that starring in that film prepared her to work with a large ensemble cast in another story of revolution.
“The thing that One Battle really prepared me for was, honestly, getting to work with an incredible group of girls,” the actress told The Hollywood Reporter. “I feel very fortunate that One Battle taught me how to work in an ensemble and form connections with other actors. And I hope that the connection we built on this show can transcend the screen as well.”
Handmaid’s creator Bruce Miller returns as showrunner for The Testaments, which premieres with three episodes on April 8. He shared that he cast Infiniti in the lead role, in part, because she reminded him so much of Handmaid’s star Elisabeth Moss.
“She was unpredictable. I didn’t know what she was going to do — not in a scary way, but I just didn’t have any idea what she was going to say, if she was going to go left or right,” he explained. “And as a person, she’s that way too. She’s delightful, but you don’t know if she’s going to say if she wants chocolate or vanilla ice cream, and no matter how much I get to know her, I don’t think I’m going to know, which is wonderful. It was the same thing with Elisabeth Moss; she’s not volatile, but she is unpredictable.”
Hulu set the mood for the evening when two dozen young women, dressed in their Gilead wife-training school’s purple uniforms, walked in solemn unison down the carpet, each carrying a small pie and boarding a bus with curtains covering the windows. The show tracks the relationship that develops between Agnes and Daisy, and Halliday said the two actresses were able to push the limits because of their off-screen friendship.
“Working with Chase was fantastic, and that friendship wasn’t hard to manifest,” Halliday said. “The second I met Chase, we had such an immediate connection. I landed the same day she landed in Toronto and we straightaway went to get dinner and I think having that relationship off screen really allowed for the frictious dynamic you see on-screen. We could really push each other and we weren’t afraid that we were going to offend this person or they were going to hate us at the end of it because we knew that we had that real friendship to fall back on.”
One of the defining features of Gilead is the Aunts, women dedicated to enforcing order and who dole out punishment to the girls in their care. Dowd returns to her career-defining role as Aunt Lydia, who is now the leader of the school where Agnes and Daisy are students.
“It felt wonderful to come back. It’s a different Gilead,” Dowd emphasized. “Lydia had time between The Handmaid’s Tale and the beginning of The Testaments to really change and accept that she had to change who she is, so we see a different side of Lydia — a different, softer and gentler person dealing with younger girls, still the girls that she loves who have always defined her life.”
Asked if she gave any advice to the new aunts played by Mabel Lee, Ava Foote and Zarrin Darnell Martin, Dowd teased, “Always follow the rules!”
