Blessed be the fruit! Hulu has finally unveiled The Testaments, the highly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and fans are already buzzing over a major departure from Margaret Atwood’s original novel.
While the series serves as a direct follow-up to the Emmy-winning phenomenon, creator Bruce Miller is opening up about why he had to make a massive change to the character of Daisy, played by Lucy Halliday.
In the original novel, Daisy is revealed to be June Osborne’s (Elisabeth Moss) second daughter, baby Nichole/Holly, living in Toronto under a different name. However, the TV adaptation throws a curveball: the show’s timeline only jumps forward four years from the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, rather than the -year gap in the book.
“It was the biggest challenge,” Miller tells PEOPLE. “In the novel, the Daisy and Agnes characters are very different in age. I didn’t want to make any changes at all, but I felt like I wanted to have Daisy and Agnes physically together.”
Because the series timeline moved so quickly, baby Holly would only be four years old—hardly the teenage rebel we see in Halliday’s performance. To bridge the gap, Miller reinvented Daisy as a Toronto teen-turned-undercover Mayday agent who crosses paths with Agnes (Chase Infiniti), June’s first daughter.
While this version of Daisy isn’t biologically related to June, the DNA of the character remains the same. “I tried to keep the essence of Nichole as much as possible with our Daisy,” Miller explains. “I tried to make June very much a mother figure in Daisy’s life—an absent mother figure, but a mother figure she knew.”
The premiere also featured a major “casting coup” that was kept top-secret until the episodes dropped: Elisabeth Moss is back! June Osborne returns as Daisy’s handler, a reveal so protected that the character was code-named “Danielle” in the scripts to avoid leaks.
Fans on X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok have been losing it over the reunion of the world of Gilead, especially seeing Agnes and Daisy team up. “Seeing June back on my screen gave me chills,” one fan wrote. “The chemistry between Agnes and Daisy is exactly what the franchise needed.”
As for the future of the series, Miller isn’t planning on a one-and-done limited run. He reveals he has enough stories in his “overflowing bucket” to keep the revolution going for years.
“Realistically, and just thinking about how the world works, I wanted to have an ending,” Miller notes. “I think of about to episodes. So three to five seasons.”
The first season, he explains, is centered on “awakening”—both romantic and political—as the girls realize the reality of the world they inhabit. Season two, should it be greenlit, will pivot to the question of identity: “Who am I? I’m awake, but who’s awake?”
And for those wondering if our protagonists will make it out alive, Miller offers a cryptic but hopeful hint based on the show’s signature voiceovers.
“They certainly all survive to record these Testaments,” he says. “But none of us survive forever. Nobody survives forever.”
The first four episodes of The Testaments are now streaming on Hulu.
