‘The Testaments’ Boss Explains That Big Book Change

If you’ve read The Testaments, Margaret Atwood‘s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and watched The Testaments TV show on Hulu, you know that there’s been a major change to the character of Daisy. While much of Daisy’s essence is maintained in the series adaptation, adapted by the creator of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, there is one major difference that sets the show apart from its source material. We asked the creator, Bruce Miller, to explain the change. Warning: Spoilers for The Testaments Episodes 1-3 and The Testaments novel ahead.

Set about four years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale series finale, The Testaments is a coming-of-age story that finds a new generation of young women in Gilead grappling with the bleak future that awaits them. For these young women, growing up in Gilead is all they have ever known, having no tangible memories of the outside world before their indoctrination into this life. Facing the prospect of being married off and living a life of servitude, they will be forced to search for allies, both new and old, to help in their fight for freedom and the life they deserve.

Chase Infiniti stars as Agnes/Hannah, the daughter of June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) and Luke Bankole (O-T Fagbenle), who was kidnapped as a child by Gilead and placed with a commander and his wife, who renamed her. Lucy Halliday stars as Daisy, one of Aunt Lydia’s Pearl Girls, immigrant girls who want to live Gilead’s way of life and hopefully become wives. As revealed in the premiere’s first three episodes, Daisy is actually working undercover for Mayday in Gilead after the regime murdered her parents in Toronto. Daisy’s backstory featured a long cameo from Moss, reprising her Emmy-winning role as June from The Handmaid’s Tale. June is mentioned throughout The Testaments book. While she doesn’t actually show up until the end, her presence is felt throughout. In the Hulu series, June appears early on, when she meets Daisy after Melanie and Neil’s deaths.

June reveals to Daisy that Melanie and Neil are Mayday operatives and aren’t her biological parents, but rather adoptive ones who took her in after she was liberated from Gilead as a young child. This mostly aligns with The Testaments book plot, with one huge caveat: Daisy is actually Nichole, June, and Nick’s (Max Minghella) daughter. Baby Nichole became a martyr symbol in Gilead in The Testaments after she was taken to Canada. In the book, she returns undercover as a Pearl Girl to try to take down Gilead through Mayday’s resistance efforts. Hannah and Nichole meet in The Testaments book, but they don’t learn they are half-sisters until later.

There’s a bigger time jump between the plots of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments novel than there is between the two shows, so the timing didn’t work out to have Daisy be Nichole in The Testaments TV show. But Miller tells TV Insider, “There is a Nichole. You actually get hints about her through the season that she exists with June in Toronto.” He explains the thought process behind the big Daisy change, sharing why they made her a chosen daughter for June instead.

Disney / Russ Martin

“Just [as] The Handmaid’s Tale book is the prequel to The Testaments book, The Handmaid’s Tale show is the prequel to The Testaments show, so there are things that just didn’t line up,” Miller says. “The other thing is, honestly, in the book, [Daisy and Agnes] are not the same age, the story just takes place over a very long period of time, and they’re not in the same area together, although they talk about the same area there lots.”

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“It just seemed to make dramatic sense that they needed to be together. All the stories that Daisy was going through would be fascinating with Hannah there, and all of the Agnes stories are fascinating with Daisy there, and that was the core relationship of the show,” he goes on. “So, I had to make a decision just based on the reality of things, and I didn’t want to just blow past logic, so I decided to not make this person Nichole.”

Miller wanted to maintain every book detail about Daisy that he could, despite the change. This included choosing an actor who resembled Moss in a way, to make their familial, while not biological, bond feel fated.

“For this character, I wanted to change as little as possible,” Miller explains. “In some ways, not only is she a chosen daughter, she looks a little like June, she acts like June. All those things were kind of my choice, kind of Lucy, kind of Lucy acting with Elisabeth Moss and starting to take on those mannerisms because they’re so fascinating with each other. There was a lot of evolution to it through the actors. And also, they liked each other quite a bit, so there was this character of June, but this actress of June, and interacting with her has filled out all sorts of cool stuff in Daisy because Lucy is such a thoughtful actor. So, I tried to make her as much at the core like Nichole as I could, but the ways it’s blooming, it’s blooming in its own way.”

Stay tuned to find out how Daisy continues to act like June, and if Agnes remembers anything about her real mother.

The Testaments, Wednesdays, Hulu