Way back in the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale, it was easy to perceive Ann Dowd’s character, Aunt Lydia, as a villain. She ran the Red Center, where women kidnapped into Gilead’s service—including Elisabeth Moss’ June Osborne—learned they’d become Handmaids, forced into sexual slavery to provide children for the new country’s richest and most powerful families. Over six seasons, viewers learned a lot more about why Lydia is the way she is. By the series finale, she’d been forced to confront her actions, and she seemingly experienced a change of heart about her rigid loyalty to Gilead.
So it might be surprising for viewers to see she’s back in a power position in The Testaments, running the Aunt Lydia School for Commander’s daughters. She’s so revered there’s a statue in her likeness in the entryway; students leave little tokens at its base, almost like an altar. More Lydia layers are peeled back as The Testaments moves through its season, but at a recent press day, io9 asked Dowd, who won an Emmy for The Handmaid’s Tale, to shed some light on Lydia’s resilience.
“Given what she went through at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, which was being brought to her knees in deep remorse, begging forgiveness, June Osborne just said it in no uncertain terms: this is what you have been doing all of these years and don’t think you can get out of it,” Dowd reflected.
“I think Lydia chooses to accept that as the truth about who she has been. And so, she has the choice to [either] make a change in her life or just fade away into nothing. She makes the choice to sit with it, to sit with the shame, to sit with the humiliation, with the walls having dropped around her, and asks herself, what is important to me? What do I want to do? How do I want to participate?”
She continued. “And I think what’s extremely clear to her is her love for the girls. It’s going to be focused on a different group of girls, the daughters of high Commanders and the Pearl Girls [new arrivals in Gilead who have converted to its teachings], but her love of the girls remains huge. She starts an academy that will educate them as to how to be mothers, the best wives they can be to their husbands, homemakers, hostesses. That’s what the focus is.”
Most importantly, “She comes into this world, I think, a gentler soul, someone who has examined what she participated in and has made deeper, other choices.”
We’ll learn more about Aunt Lydia’s journey across season one of The Testaments. The first three episodes of The Testaments arrive April 8 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+, with a weekly rollout thereafter.
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