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Hulu’s highly-anticipated The Testaments has put in a lot of work to make their cast look very different on The Handmaid’s Tale spinoff than they do in real life.
Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, The Handmaid’s Tale, which aired from 2017 to 2025, took place in a dystopian future where low fertility rates led women to be assigned to men for bearing children.
After The Handmaid’s Tale‘s final season was announced in 2022, creator Bruce Miller stepped down as showrunner to work on The Testaments as executive producers Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang took over the day-to-day duties on the flagship drama.
“We are making The Testaments, and it’s not going to track precisely,” Miller told TVLine at the time. “Margaret writes these absolutely deliciously specific characters. We had to go away from that in Handmaid’s, and we’re going to have to go away from that in Testaments. Testaments is certainly going to be a sequel to the show.”
The Testaments, which is set 15 years later, is narrated by Ann Dowd‘s Aunt Lydia as viewers are thrust back into the dystopian future with characters such as Agnes from Gilead and Daisy from Canada — as they secretly gather and smuggle incriminating information about Gilead’s regime out of the country. Agnes and Daisy pose as “Pearl Girls” to infiltrate Canada, while Aunt Lydia acts as a covert source within Gilead.
“Although I could not continue with the story of Offred, I could continue with three other people concerned in these events and tell the story of the beginning of the end, because we know from The Handmaid’s Tale that Gilead vanishes,” Atwood told journalists at an event in 2019. “It’s no longer present 200 years into the future, because they’re having a symposium on it. How did it collapse? How do these kinds of regimes disappear? I was interested in exploring that.”
She continued: “There [are] some new costume choices in this book. Human beings throughout time love outfits that tell you who you’re looking at, like football teams and things like that. So yes, we have some new outfits.”
In addition to Dowd, Chase Infiniti, Lucy Halliday, Rowan Blanchard, Amy Seimetz, Mabel Li, Brad Alexander and Mattea Conforti make up the rest of the cast. Hulu confirmed that The Testaments will premiere in April 2026.
Keep scrolling to see how The Testaments characters compare to the cast playing them:
