‘The Testaments’: Aunt Lydia & Vidala’s Shocking Backstory Explained by Stars (VIDEO)

The Testaments Episode 6 revealed an Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) backstory that changes everything you thought you knew about her in The Handmaid’s Tale.

In “Stadium,” viewers were taken back to the earliest days of Gilead, when the regime’s military forces were rounding up women and executing them based on their oppressive criteria. The Handmaid’s Tale showed Lydia’s backstory before, revealing that she was an elementary school teacher, but The Testaments revealed that Aunt Vidala (Mabel Li) was a teacher at her school as well, and her name was Vivian.

Li tells TV Insider that Vivian wasn’t devoutly religious before Gilead; her commitment to the regime is pure survival, and she’s putting on a strong front. Viewers may be shocked to learn that Lydia isn’t as fervent a believer in Gilead’s mission as it seemed in The Handmaid’s Tale. She accepted the reality of Gilead’s coup and went into survival mode.

Here and in the video above, Dowd and Li break down the episode. Warning: The Testaments Season 1 Episode 6 spoilers ahead.

Did Aunt Lydia ever support Gilead?

Disney/Steve Wilkie

The backstory revealed that Lydia and Vivian spent those harrowing early days trapped in a Massachusetts stadium together. They watched in horror as women were executed for reasons unbeknownst to them. Lydia spent this time watching carefully and planning her next steps. When the time came to be interviewed by Commander Judd (Charlie Carrick), who was overseeing the imprisonment of all of these women, Lydia carved out a place for herself by helping to create the aunt social class.

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She argued that if Gilead was to be segregated, the godly women should lead the women and girls so they’re trained to be godly as well. Judd put her loyalty to the test by demanding that she kill Vivian or die. Lydia, horrified, pulled the trigger only to learn there were no bullets in the gun.

You’d think the original Gilead aunt would believe in Gilead’s mission. To a degree, she does, but Dowd says that this episode reveals that Lydia “signed up” for life in Gilead because it was life or death if she didn’t. The religious woman she was, she did embrace some of Gilead’s ways of life internally, but Dowd says she did “not really drink the Kool-Aid.”

“I think she knew what she needed to do to move forward here and to survive,” the Emmy winner tells TV Insider. She also thinks Lydia, like in The Testaments book, could get involved with Mayday in the future, as Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) did in Handmaid‘s.

“The next step after survival is, I don’t want to be Aunt No. 8. I want to be Aunt No. 1. So I’m going to make sure I get that position. I’ll do whatever I need to do to get there. But it is survival. And I think over the years, it just grows to be a part of her. But there’s a part of her that, in the core of her, does not believe [in Gilead]. I’m not saying the writers have suggested this, but I think she has a lot going on now in her mind. Nothing gets by her. And I’m really fascinated to know what she’s going to do and how she’s going to move forward, having to do with Mayday, having to do with Agnes [Chase Infiniti].”

Was Aunt Vidala religious before Gilead?

Disney / Russ Martin

Li and the writers decided that no, Vivian was not very religious before Gilead, so her persona as an aunt is a means of survival and not who she truly is.

Li says the big questions for Vivian/Vidala in this episode between her and the writers were “How devout is she really? Is she a believer of the system? And if she is, where does that come from? And if she isn’t, where does that come from?”

“We landed on: We don’t think that she is devout,” Li reveals. “We think that she might’ve come from a devout family, but she had some personal things, like tragedies, happen that led her to question the belief system. And I think she was an unwilling participant in the Gilead regime, but she had to join for her survival after the events of Episode 6.”

Li can’t reveal what those past traumies could be, in case they explore that backstory in a potential second season. But she shares a telling story from her audition process instead.

“What I can say is that when I did my audition for the role, Mike Barker, what he liked about the audition he told me and what stood out for him is it felt like when [Vidala] warns the girls [in Episode 1], she’s with the hanging bodies and she’s telling the girls this parable of don’t tempt men, essentially, that he felt like there was something personal there. There was something, I think, violent happened to her, and there’s this personal stake in making sure that that doesn’t happen to the girls. Obviously, she’s doing that in a controlling Lydian way.”

How did Lydia and Vidala recover from the stadium?

Disney / Russ Martin

How do you come back from nearly being murdered by someone you know, let alone having to work with them every day after? The short answer is, you don’t. Vidala’s resentment for Lydia has been festering ever since, and Lydia intentionally compartmentalizes what she was willing to do to her colleague.

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“That resentment’s probably calloused over from the many, many years that they have not talked about this or acknowledged that this has happened,” Li says. “And I’m sure there hasn’t been an apology or an acknowledgement, because how can you as well? I feel like almost for both those characters, if they opened that box, they might not be able to put it back in and compartmentalize to live another day in this world.”

That’s part of the evil of Gilead. The regime forced Lydia into an impossible position and made Vivian the collateral damage, causing a wound that can never be healed. Division leads to control. Li adds, “The silence is probably just such an erasure of Vidala’s pain every day.”

“It’s so interesting that she treats Vidala as she treats her, which is not that well,” Dowd says. “She dismisses her. I don’t know where she chose to keep that in her internal life, Lydia, what she did. And I mean, how do you ever forgive something like that? How does Vidala ever say, ‘I’m just going to forgive you. You would’ve shot and killed me.’ And Vidala wants to be in Lydia’s place. She wants Lydia out, and Lydia’s no dummy. She knows that, and she’s not going to allow it to happen, period. So Vidala, you can go look elsewhere for the power you are seeking. And they don’t bring it up. It’s got to be buried in there somewhere. It’s alive in there somewhere.”

Will it come to the surface, and what will happen if it does?

Ann Dowd Reacts to Aunt Lydia’s Abortion

Disney / Steve Wilkie

One of the most stunning reveals of the episode is that Lydia had an abortion when she was young. This was part of The Testaments book, and Dowd was equally stunned to learn of this (she narrated the audiobook). Dowd says that Lydia once had progressive views on abortion.

“Wow, wow, wow. It’s incredible to think of that, having an abortion,” Dowd says of her character. “And then you trace and track where Lydia goes with her beliefs and her life. She was a very different person then. She was, I think, less judgmental, had an open mind about things, and was willing to act on something she didn’t think she could pull off. She couldn’t have the baby and raise the child, so she chose what she needed to do.”

The episode ends with the reveal that Lydia is documenting everything she learns about the powerful men and women of Gilead in a secret journal. She’s saving this information to use as a shield in the future, just in case it’s needed. Lydia grew into her more rebellious side in The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testaments revealed that while she’s an architect of Gilead, she’s not a completely willing one. Her villainy is maintained through the fact that she complies with the oppression and physical and mental abuse of others to save her own skin, but every time one of her precious girls is hurt, the cracks in her armor deepen.

The Testaments, Wednesdays, Hulu