Given the success of The Handmaid’s Tale, the spinoff The Testaments — which is set several years following the events of the Emmy-winning series — meant the bar was set high for the creative team. Luckily, viewers and critics alike have embraced the coming-of-age drama, which has already been renewed for a second season: “It’s turning out exactly the way that I’d hoped,” says showrunner and executive producer Bruce Miller. “It’s very nice to have it out in the world and have people excited about it.”
Based on the book by Margaret Atwood, the series is set in Gilead, where a group of teenaged girls are being trained for their future as wives in the dystopian world. Creating the distinctive look of that world — and distinguishing it from The Handmaid’s Tale — fell to Miller and the team, including director Mike Barker, costume designer Leslie Kavanagh, production designer Martha Sparrow, cinematographer Greta Zozula, hair department head Sueann Stewart-Green, and makeup department head Craig-Ryan French.
Gold Derby: How did you approach creating the world of The Testaments, yet making it feel different from Handmaid’s?
Bruce Miller: The first thing was to really think about what were the differences — not just kind of willy-nilly, say the sky is red not blue, but that this is a different point of view. This is a younger generation, they have a completely different perception of Gilead. Gilead is a beautiful place to them, a place they’ve figured out a way to live their lives. The first thing to do is you really have to think story-wise and character-wise, how does the point of view change, and with that comes the logical choices of, “OK, whose story are you telling?”
Mike Barker, director: You start with the material and then you start with the characters. It was about rounding out Agnes’s character [Chase Infiniti], making her a complete person because The Handmaid’s Tale came from a very specific point of view of someone who stepped into a world that she was discovering, whereas Agnes knew no different, so everything was kind of perfect until the cracks started coming in. So that’s where we started. And then aesthetically we wanted to hang on to “under the eye,” for example, so a lot of the visual motifs of the eyeball of the ceremonies we kept a certain similarity between that and Handmaid’s Tale, because ceremony is very much a part of Gilead. It was a great juxtaposition with the fact that Canada doesn’t have that kind of ceremony, so there’s a lot of that circular motif of the eye, of being watched, and of voyeurism. There’s a real sense of voyeurism. So those are some of the early conversations we had.
Martha Sparrow, production designer: The color palette is very different from Handmaid’s Tale. That begins with the difference between the red that June (Elisabeth Moss) wore as a Handmaid in Handmaid’s Tale and the plums that we have for Agnes and all of her cohorts. We started with that —what is a seed of this plum color going to look like? How do we set that within the world of the school, and how do we develop that color palette? And then with Greta as well, we redesigned the look of the show to really retain the saturation of the colors and to bring a kind of vibrancy of that youthful vision of Gilead as a beautiful place, instead of being a prison-like space. It was a collaboration between Greta and me and Leslie to find what that color palette in that world might look like.
Greta Zozula, cinematographer: It really was an amazing collaboration. We talked about every detail in terms of color, how to create that world differently, trying to find the balance of bringing a little bit of Handmaid’s into it, but then finding a way to steer away, and where that fine balance was. And then also in lighting, because Handmaid’s has such a distinct, God-like lighting through the windows, and you have these dark interiors, and it feels a little bit like a prison. I wanted to open up these spaces and really feel the sunlight, and have it be overwhelmingly beautiful to a degree, so that it wasn’t quite obvious right away what kind of world we were in, because we’re seeing it from a different perspective, and playing around with that a lot.
Leslie Kavanagh, costume designer: I think one of the big things that was talked about in the beginning, which is so achieved here, is that we aren’t making a Season 7 of Handmaid’s Tale. We wanted to create this whole new aesthetic. We camera-tested a lot of colors. One of the things to me that was really important was that we really wanted to give a more youthful, innocent lens of what it’s like. It’s the first time we’re in Gilead looking out as opposed to looking in, and we’re showcasing a much more positive, hopeful viewpoint, because that’s what all of our people that we’re focused on know. They don’t know that it’s different out on the other side of the world, and so we really wanted to showcase that. It was always making sure to not tell that right away. We’re showing all this beautifulness, and then the ugliness is just sort of lingering there on the edges. For me it was creating looks that captured every stage. We see the pinks in the world and then we go to the plums, the greens, and the wives, and it was trying to show an evolution of that process of girls who are aging and then training to become the next generation, the wives, and the hope, and the future, hopefully for Gilead.
Sueann Stewart-Green, hair department head: We see so much beauty as this world keeps coming up on the backdrop of terror in many cases, and so it’s so lovely to play with that dynamic of the rigidness and conformity in this really strange world, but also bringing the viewers in and wanting them to feel, what does it feel like to be a plum, and what’s going through the mindset of a wife, and how would that translate into their everyday, into their getting up in the morning and getting ready for the world as we know it. A lot of what was happening in the storyline informed our choices, and really being intentional with creating a world that you are almost tempted to want to be a part of. There is that feeling of I want to be a plum today. I want to feel the feral nature of a pearl girl and slick that hair right back. That’s something that’s very alluring about the feel or our show. What a wonderful opportunity to play with the dynamic of the cold and yet there’s warmth and the coming of age as a teenager, and these young girls just looking forward to the next chapter of their lives, and so we really wanted to be intentional of how we shaped the look so that others would feel a sense of pride. They don’t have much control, but there is a sense of pride that comes from these characters, where they feel that there’s a gentle power and the deliberate nature of putting their hair back and tying it up, and putting on the costume. So we really wanted to give credence to that.
Craig-Ryan French, makeup department head: Both Sue Ann and I were cramming six seasons of Handmaids while we were starting on the show. But that homework is essential. We had to continue that world that was already established. I’ll never forget, we did our makeup tests. We have obvious things that we do when we’re doing makeup — we have to get rid of tattoos, and then we realized on all of our plums, who were born in Gilead, we hadn’t done any of the ear covering of any of the piercings, because these characters versus handmaids, handmaids are coming from the real world, but these girls have never experienced the outside world. Agnes/Hannah, she was so young, so there are no piercings on her that were ever established. Creating that world, it’s like stepping into a Dutch painting is how I look at.
Steve Wilkie/Disney
What was the inspiration for the building and creation of the school?
Miller: We tried to look at what are these schools actually like in the real world, but I think Martha and I definitely wanted to move away from the dark, academia aesthetic of Handmaid’s, and that’s hard because that’s my aesthetic. I think that’s good-looking. So I think I passed along the design choices to Martha, and she went in a more arts-and-crafts, turn-of-the-century Europe vibe, and it worked out beautifully. I think the biggest thing for us was, Gilead does things on purpose, so the first thing you have to think about is, what does Gilead want to make these girls feel like? There is intention behind it. It’s not a building they just took over. You want to feel the forces of Gilead behind this. They built this. It’s beautiful for a reason, it’s spare for a reason, it’s harsh for a reason.
Sparrow: Gilead is very environmentally conscious, and a lot of their daily practices return to a traditional way of life. So aesthetically, I wanted there to be a lot of handmade and traditional details in the school, but then we also wanted it to feel somehow forward-looking and optimistic and modern, so I think that’s where we landed. So a lot of the sets have handmade tiles, tapestries, and wood details, and things that are what our modern eye might see as more traditional, but for Gilead, that is a modern version of traditional.
Barker: We were so lucky, because we found this house. On Handmaid’s of course we tended to repurpose other buildings, so we could do pretty much whatever we wanted. [This house] is on an amazing plot, and the guy who owned it was really generous enough to let us use it. We used the entrance hall, the exterior, and all those grounds as the house. Martha then built a huge set on the stage, which is where we shot a huge amount of the show, but in terms of the way that the girls interacted with it, everything was slightly over scale. The staircase is this huge big sweeping over-scale staircase, and so it diminished the women inside the set somewhat, so that everything feels smaller. Where they become big and powerful again is in those small spaces, like the toilets, and in the hidden spaces where they’re not being watched, and so that power’s returned to them. But very much, the Gilead purpose-built buildings were there to diminish them and make them feel as small as Gilead wants them to.
Can you each share a moment that you’re proudest of?
Stewart-Green: What really stood out for me was when we put our pearl girl, Lucy, in front of the camera and had her stand in front of the light on the set. Walking on set and seeing the dollhouse set. Agnes looking like a pristine doll, the pinks just being so intentional with each of the looks for the pinks, the plums, it all having symmetry, and taking cues from the art and the lighting and the sets and how the world flows together with every twist that we’ve done in each bun — it’s really all reflective of the world at large. It’s really hard to pick one thing, but I will definitely say there have been many moments where we’ve just had our breath taken out of us just by looking at the final result and saying, “Wow, doesn’t that look amazing.”
French: For me, it was the ball. In the Gilead world, the only times we really saw cosmetics in Handmaids was when commanders would give the Jezebels cosmetics like Dior or Chanel, and it was a very luxurious makeup that they would be receiving as Jezebels. But I thought with the girls getting prepared for this, there’s no way that makeup would be anywhere around those girls, especially with the Marthas and the mothers. So how are we going to come up with some type of cosmetics that the girls could use? And that’s where I thought was interesting with the arts and crafts world, it’s almost becoming pagan. Having to design those products, and come up with natural folk remedies, things that were almost representative of a menstrual cycle in the ritual, like when the girls are putting on cotton with beet juice on their cheeks. For me, that was thrilling to get to participate in that world and play with that.
Zozula: When we first captured Agnes at the window, everything came together for me in that moment. There is a very specific tone to Testaments and there is a softness to this scene in both lighting and color that is exactly what we wanted to achieve and seeing it work so effectively in this moment so early on and really feeling the show come alive. It was truly motivating and so exciting moving forward.
Sparrow: When Greta and her team lit up our sets, and the girls stepped in to the school that first day that we shot in the lunchroom in their plums. I think in designing the sets, when I was picking colors and textures, Leslie gave me a little swatch of the plum fabric, and I would try to go to the sunlight, because we’re always thinking about this sunlight aesthetic and putting that up against all the colors, and try to imagine the volume of girls in the space. When I took one of the executives who came to visit from Disney to walk the sets, he said to me, “Well, what color are these sets going to be?” and they were already painted the color they were going to be. I think he felt like they looked unfinished, because it actually wasn’t until the girls step in there and they’re in the plum that the look becomes complete. So it was really that moment when Mike got in there with everybody, and they sat in the lunchroom, and there was a buzz. It was like being in high school — that’s when it all came together.
Kavanagh: A show like this is a costume designer’s dream, to be really honest, because you’re really building every single day. There is no Gilead store, so I’m kind of the store. The ball was definitely amazing. I love the beekeeping costume. If I had to choose one moment, it was actually our very first day of shooting. It was so cold, we had all the girls in their coats and scarves, and the girls were having so much fun, and they’re running — and then the camera slowly starts to pan over, and you just see legs hanging, and it was these guardians that were hanging. It was just that whole thing of the beauty and fun and innocence of all the girls for the first time seeing them.
Barker: I have had more fun on this show than probably any other show I’ve ever worked on, but one of the moments I most remember is when we did the camera test, and all these young actors came together for the first time and then you suddenly feel the heartbeat. Because whether it’s a great costume, a great set, a great camera move, it doesn’t really matter if you haven’t got a heartbeat. And when all those young women came together, it was such a fun day, because there was no real pressure to achieve anything other than to show the world and the executives and all these other people the looks. And I just suddenly thought, this is going to work. This is going to be fantastic. This youthful energy drove us all the way through.
Miller: Well, this is a particularly nice moment — I’ll take this. But I wanted to say that the moment that really struck me was when the girls arrived on set, and they were all dressed, and they were ready to shoot, and their level of confidence in themselves was just off the charts. And it was because of all these people here, because they bring their level of expertise, but also they let the young actors be themselves, so there’s a level of respect for the actors that you felt when you saw them all together. They were being carried on the wings of our crew. They were brought there on the wings of creative angels. I think that for me, when I first saw them all together — except for the fact that they were jumping around a little too much and I was afraid they were going to kill themselves, it was really the best moment. There was a lot of jumping — it’s a jumping age.
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