Billed as The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> for a new generation, Hulu\u2019s The Testaments<\/em> did something unexpected over its first season\u2019s 10-episode run. The series, set at a preparatory academy in Gilead run by Ann Dowd\u2019s Aunt Lydia<\/a>, was never going to be a standard-issue teenage drama, replete with cliques and first crushes; the season finale reckons with the fallout after one girl murders her father. But looking back on the show\u2019s debut season\u2014adapted from Margaret Atwood\u2019s 2019 book of the same name\u2014Chase Infiniti<\/a> is proud of how its story centered the bond between its young protagonists.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that really stands out from The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> is the element of sisterhood among these young girls. Their friendship is something that\u2019s very fresh,\u201d Infiniti tells Vogue<\/em>. \u201cAlso, the show is being told from the perspective of somebody who, when you first meet them, they haven\u2019t lost anything\u201d\u2014she\u2019s referring here to her own character, Agnes\u2014\u201cand with Handmaid\u2019s<\/em>, it\u2019s following the perspective of a handmaid who\u2019s lost everything. But I think the special thing, to me, is the sisterhood\u2014the friendship that these girls have and how strong it is even though [it\u2019s] not allowed.\u201d<\/p>\n Infiniti, Mattea Conforti, Rowan Blanchard, and Isolde Ardies in The Testaments.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/span>Photo: \u00a9Hulu\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n From their first conversations about The Testaments<\/em>\u2014which also stars Lucy Halliday as Daisy, a Toronto teenager who infiltrates the academy for the resistance group Mayday\u2014creator Bruce Miller and executive producer Elisabeth Moss agreed that the new series should move away from the heaviness of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>, which wrapped its sixth and final season last year with Gilead\u2019s leadership all but being wiped out. Moss, who played June in Handmaid\u2019s<\/em><\/a>, says they wanted to lean into the fact that The Testaments<\/em> is told largely from the perspective of younger women and allow it to have a different sensibility, which meant making the show less violent than its predecessor. As a result, though the girls still live in fear of Gilead\u2019s medieval justice system, the brutality is far less visible on screen and more often comes at their own hands.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was always this idea of having a slightly, I don\u2019t know if lighter<\/em> is the right word, because there\u2019s definitely some pretty crazy, dark stuff that happens\u2026 but just having a new energy,\u201d says Moss, who was mostly carrying out her producing duties away from set, since her new series, Apple TV\u2019s Imperfect Women<\/em>, was filming at the same time.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd, to that point, if there was anything that was violent in the show, I would sometimes be like, \u2018Eh, do we have to?\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen a lot of that, and I really wanted to give the audience something new. So I was really pushing to try to keep things, as much as I could, away from what we had done before.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/assets.vogue.com\/photos\/6a1e9958dbfe3445b16a79bb\/master\/w_1600%2Cc_limit\/TCDTEST_HY064.jpg\"\/)
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