Billed as The Handmaid’s Tale for a new generation, Hulu’s The Testaments did something unexpected over its first season’s 10-episode run. The series, set at a preparatory academy in Gilead run by Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia, was never going to be a standard-issue teenage drama, replete with cliques and first crushes; the season finale reckons with the fallout after one girl murders her father. But looking back on the show’s debut season—adapted from Margaret Atwood’s 2019 book of the same name—Chase Infiniti is proud of how its story centered the bond between its young protagonists.
“One of the things that really stands out from The Handmaid’s Tale is the element of sisterhood among these young girls. Their friendship is something that’s very fresh,” Infiniti tells Vogue. “Also, the show is being told from the perspective of somebody who, when you first meet them, they haven’t lost anything”—she’s referring here to her own character, Agnes—“and with Handmaid’s, it’s following the perspective of a handmaid who’s lost everything. But I think the special thing, to me, is the sisterhood—the friendship that these girls have and how strong it is even though [it’s] not allowed.”
From their first conversations about The Testaments—which also stars Lucy Halliday as Daisy, a Toronto teenager who infiltrates the academy for the resistance group Mayday—creator Bruce Miller and executive producer Elisabeth Moss agreed that the new series should move away from the heaviness of The Handmaid’s Tale, which wrapped its sixth and final season last year with Gilead’s leadership all but being wiped out. Moss, who played June in Handmaid’s, says they wanted to lean into the fact that The Testaments is told largely from the perspective of younger women and allow it to have a different sensibility, which meant making the show less violent than its predecessor. As a result, though the girls still live in fear of Gilead’s medieval justice system, the brutality is far less visible on screen and more often comes at their own hands.
“There was always this idea of having a slightly, I don’t know if lighter is the right word, because there’s definitely some pretty crazy, dark stuff that happens… but just having a new energy,” says Moss, who was mostly carrying out her producing duties away from set, since her new series, Apple TV’s Imperfect Women, was filming at the same time.
“And, to that point, if there was anything that was violent in the show, I would sometimes be like, ‘Eh, do we have to?’” she says. “We’ve seen a lot of that, and I really wanted to give the audience something new. So I was really pushing to try to keep things, as much as I could, away from what we had done before.”
