Ann Dowd is not done with Aunt Lydia just yet. The actor returns when The Testaments premieres Sunday on Hulu, picking up the role she played for six seasons on The Handmaid’s Tale.
Dowd said she was not ready to give up the character, and it shows in the way she talks about her return. Aunt Lydia, she said, is “a complete gift” and one she can hardly believe she still gets to play. In the sequel, the once fearsome enforcer has changed. Dowd said Lydia was brought to her knees at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, “deeply remorseful, wanting forgiveness,” after doing “wrong things and awful things.”
The Testaments picks up several years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, which ended last May, and follows the world of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian chronicle into a new phase. Dowd said Lydia is now “a gentler self,” and that the character has become the through-line connecting both Gilead novels. The sequel centers on students at Lydia’s academy for the daughters of high commanders in Gilead, with Chase Infiniti as Agnes and Lucy Holliday as Daisy.
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That academy is a sharp turn from the regime’s earlier brutality, but not a soft one. The school teaches girls to be a hostess, a wife, a mother and a homemaker, and it does not teach reading, writing or mathematics. Lydia has built a place that still serves Gilead’s aims, only with a different tone, and Dowd described that as “It’s a whole different world.”
The tension in Lydia’s return is that she has not become harmless. She has changed, but only so far. Dowd said the character has learned to “begin again,” yet she also made clear that force still sits close to the surface: “If I want anything to change, I’m going to have to use force and scare them into it, or they’re not going to listen to a word I’m saying.” That is the same woman who once ruled by fear, now trying to govern with something closer to affection.
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That split is what makes The Testaments more than a simple continuation. It gives Dowd a way to play Lydia as both penitent and powerful, and it puts the character at the center of a story that returns to Gilead years later without pretending its cruelties have disappeared. The question now is not whether Aunt Lydia comes back. She does. The question is whether anyone in Gilead can tell the difference between her mercy and her control.
