The Testaments’ Major Handmaid’s Tale Cameo Officially Explained by Creator

The Testaments takes place around four years after The Handmaid’s Tale‘s ending, but that doesn’t mean a few familiar faces don’t appear. At least one of them is crucial to the story: Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) is still in Gilead, now running a preparatory school that the Plums attend before they’re married off to Commanders. But there’s also room for a cameo, which comes in The Testaments‘ three-episode premiere. SPOILERS follow for Episodes 1-3, as well as mild spoilers for the book it’s based on.

The first episode of The Testaments Season 1 centers around two characters. There’s Agnes MacKenzie (Chase Infiniti), who, yes, is actually Hannah, the daughter of June Osborne and Luke Bankole, taken by Gilead many years earlier. And then there’s Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a newcomer to Gilead who has arrived from Canada, ostensibly driven by a desire to find God and change her life. The end of Episode 1 has a flashback to Daisy’s life in Toronto, where she’s being watched by none other than June, with Elisabeth Moss returning to the role.

This is fully explained in Episode 3, when June reappears after the shop owned by Daisy’s parents has been attacked by Gilead. She reveals that Daisy herself was rescued from Gilead as a child, who were none too pleased about it, and that Mayday has been watching her. This is what puts Daisy on the path back to Gilead, and showrunner Bruce Miller has explained the decision to include Moss’ character, telling The Hollywood Reporter:

“From the beginning, I felt like June would end The Handmaid’s Tale with certain business unfinished, so if you were going to tap back into Gilead, you would want to know what June was doing. She’s doing something — she hasn’t retired from dramatic operation. It just made sense. Even in the book, The Testaments, June is operating from the outside. You just don’t see her. So that was always an option.

“June would always be in this show. It’s a show about her daughter, and she certainly would be very curious about what happened and would be as influent in that life as she could be. It made sense. Then, of course, Elisabeth [Moss] was such a creative partner on The Handmaid’s Tale with me and Warren [Littlefield, executive producer]. She directed and we worked as closely as you could possibly work with anybody. She was absolutely spectacular.

“So the chance to bring her back in this role came from the fact that she came back in all her other roles. She’s an executive producer on this show. She’s our creative partner. It really did feel like if we had the opportunity, we could bring June into the show in a very natural way because we didn’t have to make a June show. We could bring her in when she affected one of our other stories.”

What Elisabeth Moss’ Return as June Osborne Means For The Testaments

With June back in the picture, there is a question of just how much she’ll be involved. The character has a direct impact on everything in this world: it’s her daughter, it’s set after her rebellion, and she’s still fighting against Gilead. At the same time, this isn’t her story; it’s that of Agnes and Daisy. Miller explained that it was a matter of balancing what was needed for the narrative, along with what was possible with Moss’ schedule, saying:

“It is always a balance of the very, very quotidian practical and the very, very heavy artistic. So what I tried to do is stay in the, ‘Let’s figure out a good story for June. What’s she going to be doing in these episodes?’ And then I just try to be flexible because Elisabeth Moss’ schedule is very full. She’s a very busy artist who does lots of crazy, cool, interesting things, and I want her to continue that. To shoot the show, she has to physically be there. It’s not something you can do via Zoom. So we had to think about that.

“What I got was a sense of how long I would have her. Whether it’s going to be a day or two days or a week, and then I started to figure out how many episodes I could use her in and what stories I could tell. It ends up being practical. Like, how could she get to this set? But within that practicality, you really want those scenes to feel particularly epic.”

So far, it’s a balance the show is getting right. It makes a lot of sense for June to be involved, given that we knew she would be continuing to work with Mayday after The Handmaid’s Tale series finale. It’s also fitting that she’s still involved in Hannah’s story, perhaps even without knowing it: what’s not clear is whether June knows that Daisy is sent to where her daughter and Aunt Lydia are. Similarly, while Lydia’s turn against Gilead was set up by the parent show, it’s also not apparent whether she’s had any communication with June in the years since the fall of Boston, as Miller discusses:

“I don’t know that they’ve seen each other since, but they know they’re out there somewhere. June knows at the end of this message train is Lydia, and Lydia knows somewhere at the end of this message train is June. I think they’ve had enough experience together to modulate how they’re going to trust each other, and it’s interesting to watch. You can see it from a distance, how Lydia feels a certain way watching over June’s daughter. You feel that she’s been watching her since the beginning. It’s one of the first things she says, ‘I’ve been watching you for such a long time.’ And Agnes is like, Oh, crap.’

Quite how that is paid off remains to be seen, but the inclusion of Moss’ character certainly adds to the stakes of The Testaments. It grounds it in The Handmaid’s Tale‘s world even while, stylistically and narratively, it succeeds in forging its own path. And it gives the show a clear endgame, even if it might take years to get there, which is whether June and Hannah can finally be reunited. That was always at the heart of June’s story in The Handmaid’s Tale, and now we’re getting to see the flip side of it with Hannah/Agnes in The Testaments, which makes it all the more compelling to have June looming over things from a distance.

New episodes of The Testaments release on Wednesdays on Hulu.

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