June Osborne is back, and Elisabeth Moss says she always was going to be. The Handmaid’s Tale star said in a new interview that June appears at the end of the first episode of The Testaments and then runs through the season as a mentor to Daisy, a Toronto girl who slips into Gilead as a Mayday operative.
By the end of season one, June agrees to let Daisy try her own tactics, with one condition hanging over the fight: keep collateral damage as low as possible. That turn matters because June is not simply passing the torch. She is watching a younger insurgent move through the same machinery of repression that shaped her own life, and she is doing it while thinking about Hannah, the daughter Gilead took from her as a toddler.
Hannah is now the same age as Daisy, and she is known in Gilead as Agnes. That link gives the story its sharpest emotional edge. Daisy is not just another recruit. She is one of Agnes’s closest friends, which means June realizes her long-lost child is tied directly to the rebellion she has been chasing for years. Moss said that fact had been built into the project from the start, even if viewers did not yet know it.
“We always knew that June was going to be in it,” Moss said. She said she had known for years from Bruce Miller that June was not going to get Hannah out at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, and that Margaret Atwood’s sequel novel had already made the same point. “Margaret Atwood wrote the sequel [novel], and Hannah didn’t get out,” she said.
That is why the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale was left open rather than neatly resolved. Moss said the goal was to close that chapter in a way that served both series. “The most important thing for me was that we could end Handmaid’s in a way that made sense for that show, but also made sense for The Testaments, which is an incredible gift and tricky with the audience,” she said. She added that it was hard not to tell fans that June’s story was not finished. “It was difficult at times to not be able to tell the fans, ‘Guys, it’s okay. June’s story is so not over. The Handmaid’s ending isn’t really even an ending,’” she said.
The connection between the two shows is what gives The Testaments its momentum. The Handmaid’s Tale ended with June’s struggle still unresolved, but The Testaments moves that struggle forward by placing June inside the next phase of resistance. Moss said she and Miller had mapped that out long before cameras rolled. “[Miller and I] knew that I was going to have multiple [Testaments] episodes and that there was going to be an arc and a larger plan for June,” she said.
For Moss, that larger plan is part of why she still wants to play the character. “I would never want to stop playing her,” she said. “As long as there’s a Gilead, she’s never going to stop fighting.” That may be the clearest answer yet to where June Osborne goes next: not out of the story, but deeper into it, with the fight still unfinished and her daughter now standing uncomfortably close to the center of it.
