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The Handmaid’s Tale spinoff The Testaments went through some major changes — specifically when it comes to the cast.
Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, The Testaments is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which aired from 2017 to 2025 and takes place in a dystopian future where low fertility rates lead women to be assigned to men for the purpose of bearing children.
The Testaments, published in 2019, is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. In the show, Ann Dowd‘s Aunt Lydia narrates as viewers are thrust back into the dystopian future with characters such as Agnes from Gilead and Daisy from Canada. Together, 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.”
When The Testaments premiered in April 2026, creator Bruce Miller explained what writers pulled from the page — and what they didn’t.
“I’m trying to not necessarily take things in the order they happen in the book, but to take the big central elements and move them into a timeline that makes as much sense as we can,” Miller told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re definitely trying to follow the overall story of the book, but the ins and outs of the actual storyline are difficult because characters are different ages, and we had to redefine the Daisy character to keep things practical in our world.”
Miller also wanted to expand in certain areas.
“With Handmaid’s, there was always stuff to mine. All the way up to the last season, we were mining pieces. A lot of these things are mentioned in the book very vaguely, and we said, ‘Oh, let’s take that seed and let it bloom,’” he continued. “But this is Margaret’s world, and that’s the resource that we should be going to. She’s a very solid storyteller, so if we’re going to do something different than what Margaret did, we need a reason. I’m trying to [adapt] as much as I can because I think it worked in the book for a reason, not because I have general fealty to the book.”
Keep scrolling to see which The Handmaid’s Tale cast members didn’t make the move to The Testaments:
Agnes MacKenzie
After Jordana Blake starred as June’s daughter in The Handmaid’s Tale, Chase Infiniti takes on the role as The Testaments checks in on Agnes as a teenager.
Commander MacKenzie
Jason Butler Harner originated the role of Hannah’s (a.k.a. Agnes’) dad in The Handmaid’s Tale. In The Testaments, Nate Corddry is now the patriarch of the family.
