In The Testaments, Lucy Halliday plays Daisy, a Toronto teen turned undercover Mayday agent at a Gilead girls finishing school. She’s the character that brought Elisabeth Moss‘ June Osborne back into the franchise — as June is Daisy’s handler. Moss’ onscreen return was a casting coup that was kept secret until Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel series premiered. (Daisy was also code-named “Danielle” in the script to keep Halliday’s character under wraps.)
In Margaret Atwood‘s The Testaments novel on which the series is based, however, the Daisy character is very different. In that story, (spoiler from the book!) Daisy is actually June’s second daughter, who Handmaid’s Tale viewers know as baby Nichole/Holly. But when creator Bruce Miller and his team decided to jump the sequel series ahead only four years from the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, instead of 15 years like the book, they had to make this key character change. So Miller turned her into someone around the same age of starring character Agnes — June’s first daughter who is played by Chase Infiniti. Daisy isn’t biologically related to either June or Agnes, but Miller made sure to keep the essence of who Daisy is — a fighter, like June (and Agnes).
Below, Miller explains that key change and also looks ahead to how many seasons he hopes The Testaments will go, and whether or not he has a final scene in mind.
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When we did our oral history at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, you revealed that Margaret Atwood gavve you a no-kill list for the series once she started writing The Testaments. You couldn’t kill Aunt Lydia (the returning character played by Ann Dowd), or June or either of June’s daughters. But when you decided to jump four years ahead, instead of 15, that complicated baby Holly, because that would make her 4 instead of a teen like the original Daisy character in the book. How did you decide to update Daisy into the character we see played by Lucy Halliday, and was that the biggest change you made?
Yes, and it was the biggest challenge. When making Handmaids, I followed the “when in doubt, follow Margaret” policy. And it worked very, very well. Not just out of fealty to her or to the book, but practically, she’s a very good storyteller. Sometimes there are things that I don’t understand, even though I’ve read that book for 30 years, and it’s great that I can put this in the show and it’s really interesting, even though I didn’t quite know how it would go.
So with The Testaments, I was trying very hard to do the same thing. There are differences in the timelines between the show and the book. TV goes at a different place. She can go any time with a novel. In the novel The Testaments, the Daisy and Agnes characters are very different in age. So, they wouldn’t ever be together the way they are in the show.
I didn’t want to make any changes at all, but I felt like I wanted to have Daisy and Agnes physically together, and not tell their stories 15 years apart like they do in the book. So it was very hard and I didn’t want to do it, but Daisy is not Nichole/Holly. Holly exists in the series and she’s a child — you see her boots in one scene and there are little hints that she’s out there. But I tried to change as little else as I could.
I tried to make June very much a mother figure in Daisy [Halliday]’s life — an absent mother figure, but a mother figure she knew. June had the notoriety that Nichole had in the book. And I tried to cast someone who looked similar or reminiscent of June. I tried to keep the essence of Nichole as much as possible with our Daisy, but still make her her own character and her own person. I had to make a decision. I didn’t want to bend time and tell everybody the time space continuum isn’t true.
The Handmaid’s Tale was such a pivotal series for Hulu and went on for six seasons. How many seasons have you thought about or plotted out for The Testaments? And I know with Handmaid’s, you always had the vision of what your final scene of the series would be. Do you have that same final vision you are working towards with The Testaments?
I have a sense of where I want to end, but I don’t have a scene of where I want to go. In terms of seasons, the flip answer is that when I start to work on any project, you want to be able to think of 200 episodes-worth of ideas. Because if you hit some crazy home run in success, you don’t want to say, “I’m screwed. I don’t have stuff.” You want to feel like you have a real overflowing bucket of stories.
But realistically, and just thinking about how the world works, I wanted to have an ending. It can’t be like an old TV show that just ends. That would be so unsatisfying. So I think just out of trying to end it in a satisfying way in the business environment that we exist in, I think of about 30 to 50 episodes. So three to five seasons.
And then, if we are lucky enough to get that, or we’re lucky enough to get season two even, all of that will be wonderful. But I want to make sure I’m not writing myself into a corner. I’m always excited. If they decide I can do 10 more, great. This cast is so fascinating. We could write Agnes scenes for the rest of our lives. She’s terrific.
How would you say you wrote a finale that sets up where you want to go in season two?
Season one is about an awakening. Your romantic awakening, your sexual awakening, the way your body awakens when you’re 14 or 15. And the way your mind opens up to justice. That’s what the season is about — their awakening to where they are and the world they’re in. By the end of the season, those realities are laid bare even more. By the end, you want them to really understand where they are and what their future holds. At some point, she’s going to find out more about her past, so then season two will be about: Who am I? I’m awake, but who’s awake? Who am I?
With The Handmaid’s Tale, we always talked about how June was narrating the story, which meant she survived. Do you want a similar feeling for The Testament‘s voices who are telling this story, that we are hearing from women who got out of Gilead?
I like the practical part of that, because half the show is voiceover. If you can’t not tell your actor what room they’re doing the voiceover in — what they’re reading from or where that memory comes from. You have to come up with a real specific: “Daisy, you are sitting in this room with a tape recorder, you’re holding loose-leaf binder paper that you have written with a blue pen, and written all these notes down and you are reading along.” Just saying, “Do voiceover” doesn’t work.
They certainly all survive to record these Testaments. But none of us survive forever. Nobody survives forever.
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The Testaments is now streaming the first four episodes, with new episodes releasing Wednesdays on Hulu. Read more of THR‘s show coverage.
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