Ann Dowd is back as Aunt Lydia in The Testaments Hulu: Ann Dowd returns as Aunt Lydia in sequel, the sequel to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian chronicle that premieres Sunday on Hulu. Dowd, who played Aunt Lydia for six seasons on The Handmaid’s Tale, said she was not ready to give up the role.
Dowd called Aunt Lydia “a complete gift. I can’t believe it.” In the years since the original series concluded last May, she said the character was brought to her knees, deeply remorseful and wanting forgiveness, and has since become “a changed person.” In The Testaments, she enters as “a gentler self.”
That shift matters because Aunt Lydia now sits at the center of the new series, which follows events several years after The Handmaid’s Tale ended. Dowd co-stars with Chase Infiniti and Lucy Holliday, who play Agnes and Daisy, students at Aunt Lydia’s new academy for the daughters of high commanders in Gilead. The school teaches girls to be “a hostess, a wife, a mother, a homemaker,” and does not teach reading, writing or mathematics.
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Dowd said Aunt Lydia loved the girls deeply in The Handmaid’s Tale and that she felt “very privileged” for the connection the character provides to the past. But the new version of Lydia is not the same woman who helped enforce Gilead’s brutality. She has built a school, softened over time, and now carries the weight of what came before.
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That is the tension at the heart of The Testaments: a character once defined by discipline and cruelty is now being asked to stand as a bridge between two eras of Gilead. Dowd’s own answer to that transformation is clear. “No. I never experienced her that way,” she said of seeing Aunt Lydia as merely one thing. In the sequel, she is something harder to pin down — and, for the series, far more interesting.
