Ann Dowd is Aunt Lydia again. The Testaments, the sequel series to The Handmaid’s Tale based on Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel, premieres tomorrow on Hulu with its first three episodes.
Dowd played Aunt Lydia across all six seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, from 2017 to 2025, and won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2017 for the role.
It is one of the most morally complex characters in prestige television, a woman who tortured handmaids in the name of a religious regime she claimed to believe in, while slowly becoming something more complicated than a villain.
When the original series ended, there was a real question about whether Dowd was finished with her.
“I wasn’t ready to give up” playing the character, Dowd told Deadline. She describes Aunt Lydia as “a complete gift. I can’t believe it. She was brought to her knees at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, deeply remorseful, wanting forgiveness.”
The character had “done wrong things and awful things” but had “allowed the walls to break and to come down and she was left with nothing.”
What The Testaments offers Dowd is the chance to play what comes after that reckoning.
What Is The Testaments?
The Testaments is set approximately four to five years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. The world of Gilead still stands, but something has shifted.
Aunt Lydia is no longer the iron enforcer of the handmaid system. She runs an elite preparatory school for the daughters of Gilead’s most senior commanders.
The institution is a finishing school disguised as a sanctuary, where obedience is instilled with divine justification and where Lydia, watching the next generation, begins to understand that the entire Gilead experiment may need to be dismantled.
Dowd describes this version of the character as markedly different:
“It’s a gentler Lydia. That fierceness, that wall is no longer present. Now, it’s there somewhere in her, it doesn’t just disappear, but I think her focus is on the school and what she wants the girls to learn about being a hostess, a wife, a mother, a homemaker. Note, no reading, writing, mind you, no mathematics.”
She paused, then added: “Rules are rules, and they are enforced, you can be sure, and with God’s blessing.”
She also made her own position clear, “Deferring to men is exhausting and it shouldn’t be happening.”
Who Are The New Characters?
The show centers on two teenagers whose lives collide at Aunt Lydia’s school.
Agnes is played by Chase Infiniti, the breakout star of the Best Picture winner One Battle After Another.
Agnes is not who she appears to be. She is Hannah Bankole, the biological daughter of June Osborne, the heroine of the original series, the child who was taken from June and Luke in Gilead’s early days and raised by a Commander and his wife.
For the entire run of The Handmaid’s Tale, June was fighting to get Hannah back. The Testaments begins with Hannah, now a teenager, starting to understand who she actually is.
Daisy is played by Lucy Halliday. Daisy is a Canadian teenager living a normal life whose world collapses when she discovers a dark secret that ties her family directly to Gilead.
She arrives at the school as an outsider and a new convert, and her friendship with Agnes becomes the catalyst for everything that follows.
Rowan Blanchard plays Shunammite, a pampered girl from a prominent Gilead family whose status gives her a specific kind of power among her peers.
Amy Seimetz plays Paula, Agnes’s stepmother. The full cast also includes Mabel Li, Brad Alexander, Mattea Conforti, and others playing figures in Lydia’s school and the wider world of Gilead.
Behind The Making Of The Testaments
Bruce Miller, who created The Handmaid’s Tale and returns as showrunner and writer for The Testaments, has been clear that this series is a deliberate tonal departure.
Where the original was about suffering, survival, and sustained darkness, The Testaments is a coming-of-age story, one set against the same dystopian backdrop but focused on the ways young women form bonds, find identity, and start to resist.
“The Testaments has a very different tone,” Miller told the Royal Television Society. “It’s light and positive. These girls grew up in Gilead and found a way to be themselves.”
Executive producer Warren Littlefield added:
“People look at us and go, ‘Oh, it’s Trump-related.’ It’s not. It’s bigger. That’s not the only force of the far right, the patriarchy that is trying to take over. There are many forces out there. We are watching the rise of that. Margaret feels that and is able to write about it and give us a roadmap.”
Elisabeth Moss, who starred as June Osborne throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, serves as an executive producer on The Testaments.
Director Mike Barker directed the first three episodes.
Who Is Ann Dowd?
Ann Dowd was born January 30, 1956, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She trained at the Catholic University of America and has been a working character actor for decades, the kind of actor whose face appeared in films and television constantly without the name recognition her talent deserved.
She appeared in Philadelphia, Garden State, Compliance, Her, and The Leftovers before The Handmaid’s Tale changed everything.
Her Emmy win for Aunt Lydia in 2017 was widely regarded as overdue acknowledgment of a career full of extraordinary work.
The role gave her visibility commensurate with what she had always been capable of doing. She has not stopped working since, and her next project after The Testaments is a role as a sad blue alien in the final season of Hacks opposite Jean Smart, which she has described enthusiastically in recent interviews.
She has said of her relationship with Aunt Lydia that it has become genuinely personal. “She speaks to me. I speak to her. I’ve come to know her, and I have found her to be tremendously helpful in certain ways in my life.”
When To Catch The Testaments
The Testaments premieres tomorrow, Wednesday April 8, on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. Three episodes drop at once.
New episodes follow weekly every Wednesday through May 27, 2026, for a total of ten episodes. The series holds an 84 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from early critics.
If you watched The Handmaid’s Tale, you spent six seasons watching June Osborne fight to find her daughter.
The Testaments is the other side of that story. Hannah is alive, she is in Aunt Lydia’s school, and she is starting to figure out who she is and where she came from.
Ann Dowd says she was not ready to give up the character. After watching her play Aunt Lydia for the better part of a decade, the feeling is mutual.
