Plus, Bruce Miller emphatically says he didn’t want the sequel to dictate the ending of “Handmaid’s” and vice versa.

Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.

• The Handmaid’s Tale creator Bruce Miller gives an update on where his sequel series The Testaments is at.
• Miller promises he didn’t want the sequel to dictate the ending of Handmaid’s, and vice versa, saying “it’s about a different world”
• The showrunner also teases what fans can expect, namely, that it’s “about Mean Girls growing up Gilead.”

From one tale to another: The Handmaid’s Tale‘s sixth and final season just started streaming on Hulu, but its sequel series The Testaments is already well underway.

While picking his brain about the former series, Entertainment Weekly got the creator of both shows — Bruce Miller — to provide an update on the new one. First and foremost, he says he didn’t want the sequel to dictate the upcoming finale of the current series, and vice versa.

“Absolutely not,” Miller says emphatically. “I didn’t want Testaments to dictate Handmaid’s Tale, and I didn’t want Handmaid’s Tale to dictate Testaments. Some of the characters overlap, but it’s about a different world.”

To recap, based on the best-selling 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale follows June (Elisabeth Moss), a fertile woman forced into sexual servitude as a handmaid in the totalitarian nation of Gilead, who becomes a revolutionary in the process of trying to reunite with and save her daughter, Hannah.

During the series’ run, Atwood released a sequel novel in 2019, The Testaments, which is set 15 years after the first and is told alternatively by a newly rebellious Aunt Lydia, via a series of diary entries, and June’s two daughters, referred to as Agnes (whose birth name is Hannah in Handmaid’s) and Daisy (known as Nichole), in chapters simply dubbed “witness transcripts.”

“Handmaid’s Tale is about the life of a handmaid. This woman who was pulled from her life and pushed to the absolute bottom in Gilead and told she was worthless. She wasn’t even a woman anymore, she was just a uterus, and seeing her fight back and keep her humanity,” Miller explains. “[Testaments] is about someone on the top in Gilead. This is about Hannah or Agnes, who’s the daughter of a high commander who is the top of the food chain for women in Gilead, and it’s still awful. That’s what we find out, is that being on the top of a food chain in a misogynistic society doesn’t make it any better. It just puts more of a target on your head.”

The contrast between June’s struggles and the struggles of these young women is intriguing to Miller, who teases that “being young, and the fun and energy of being young, and the snarkiness and the power of being 14-15 years old, that is very much there” and the biggest difference between the two shows.

He continues, “It’s really interesting and fascinating and so exciting to be looking at the younger women in Gilead, and that energy, and those people who are being told they have all of this power, only to have that power taken away. You’re on the top of the heap except you are submissive to your husband. It’s such a fascinating show.”

Miller confirms that the new series is starting pre-production, and casting is done, with Ann Dowd returning as Aunt Lydia, and Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday in the lead roles of Agnes and Daisy. Mabel Li, Amy Seimetz, Brad Alexander, Zarrin Darnell-Martin, Eva Foote, Isolde Ardies, Shechinah Mpumlwana, Birva Pandya, Kira Guloien, Rowan Blanchard and Mattea Conforti round out the cast. Moss is on board as an executive producer.

Miller teases “all sorts of amazing surprises from all different worlds,” and that the new series is “coming together so beautifully.” He also reveals, “It’s about Mean Girls growing up Gilead. I mean, it really is about what it’s like to be young and full of energy when the country is trying to turn you into something awful, when all of a sudden they’ve been telling you, ‘you are wonderful, you’re perfect, and now do these terrible things.'”

For Miller, in addition to learning more about Hannah/Agnes, the most “exciting” thing about dipping into this new show is, in a roundabout way, getting to know his Handmaid’s heroine better. “You really get to know June from what are the parts of June in Agnes that she can’t repress? So you really start to get to know our June even better, because in the end, Handmaid’s Tale is a fuse that June lights, but the girls explode. Her daughter and her daughters’ friends are the ones that, with her help, end up bringing down Gilead, as the Testaments [tells us].”

Ultimately, this means the sequel is about the potential of young women, “and how incredible they are,” Miller says. He concludes, “I like that. I mean, it’s not another voice saying, ‘You can’t do this. You can’t do that. You shouldn’t do this, and don’t eat that, and don’t wear this.’ It’s none of that. It’s all about you cannot take the 14-year-old out of a 14-year-old girl. Not in any universe. It’s the dumbest idea Gilead has. Let’s try to control teen girls. That’s a great idea.”

Elisabeth Moss in season 6 of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. | Hulu

The Testaments does not yet have a release date set at Hulu. The first three episodes of the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale are available now on the streamer, with new episodes dropping weekly until the highly anticipated finale May 27.