‘The Testaments’ Bosses Break Down That Big ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Cameo: ‘How the Puzzle Fits Together’

Note: This article contains spoilers from Season 1, Episodes 1-3 of “The Testaments.”

Bruce Miller and Warren Littlefield, executive producers for “The Testaments,” unpacked that massive “Handmaid’s Tale” cameo of June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss), saying the rebellious handmaid is the puzzle piece that connects the spinoff to the original series.

“For [Elisabeth Moss], that character is so, so embedded into her soul,” Littlefield told TheWrap. “So for Lizzy, not letting go of June, she’s like, ‘Yes, I honor her, and I want to keep her presence.’ But Lizzie — also the extremely gifted executive producer — was like, ‘But we can’t overdo it.’ So that’s what we tried to navigate … That’s a scary thing to let her go and not have her there as our rudder.”

The first three episodes of “The Testaments,” based on Margaret Atwood’s 2019 followup novel, aired Tuesday night, blessing fans with a new, younger, but just as gritty look at Gilead. Set four to five years after the events that went down in the series finale of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the show is centered on the girls taking up education and grooming at Aunt Lydia’s school for future wives.

If you watched “The Handmaid’s Tale,” you know that June made it out of Gilead and came back with the underground resistance Mayday to save dozens more handmaids while taking down the Gilead regime in Boston. However, the one mission she didn’t accomplish was rescuing her daughter Hannah, who has since been renamed to Agnes (Chase Infiniti).

“I really felt [when] you get to the end of ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ some of June — as a character — some of her goals have been met,” Miller explained. “Some have been dashed, and she’s never going to meet them. But some are still out there, and one of them is her daughter and the fate of her daughter.”

And that’s where the story continues in “The Testaments,” but through the lives of Agnes, her group of schoolmates and a newcomer named Daisy (Lucy Halliday).

Daisy is a pearl girl, a young girl who is often an outsider that joins Gilead and assimilates into the structures and practices of the nation. While June appears in the first episode, the show later reveals that her presence is tied to Daisy’s true purpose in Gilead: She’s part of Mayday too.

“As much as [‘The Testaments’] is about Hannah/Agnes, it also is about that force that is outside, trying to help, trying to insert themselves,” Miller said. “But in the book, ‘The Testaments,’ even though June isn’t in it very much till the very end, her influence is in it the whole time. So to me, it felt like the opportunity of a TV show is to really be able to dramatize that and show that. And also we had to make some changes.

He continued: “One of the big changes was that I was unable to kind of fit Daisy and Agnes in the same timeline, so I had to change Daisy’s character. She’s not [June’s youngest daughter] Nichole, but in every other way I want her to feel like a daughter figure so that June had a relationship with her like that. And so it was very important for me to bring her in at the beginning and establish their relationship.”

By the end of the series, the producers say fans will have a full understanding of how the two are “connected.”

“There’s some critically valuable, important, informative moments throughout these 10 episodes where we go, ‘Wow, June. That’s how the puzzle fits together,'” Littlefield said. “But we didn’t abuse that, so that the audience feels that their ongoing commitment to be with ‘The Testaments.'”

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