Exactly When The Testaments Takes Place After The Handmaid’s Tale — And Who Agnes Really Is

Hulu is back in the world of red cloaks and brutal theocracy with The Testaments, and yes, it is very much a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. The original show wrapped in 2025, but Margaret Atwood had already handed them a roadmap in her 2019 novel (the one she wrote 34 years after the first book). Because the series version of Handmaid's blew past the end of Atwood's original story way back in Season 1, The Testaments TV adaptation has to juggle timelines, character ages, and a couple of major reveals to make everything line up. Fair warning before we go further: spoilers ahead for The Testaments book and Episodes 1-3.

Where The Testaments Picks Up

The show sets itself about four years after the fall of Boston — that city was liberated from Gilead at the very end of Handmaid's Tale Season 6. That puts us close enough to the previous series that the world still looks familiar: Gilead controls big chunks of the U.S., keeps meddling across the border in Canada, and the fighting has not slowed down. It also leaves just enough runway for a quick Elisabeth Moss cameo as June Osborne.

That timing is a notable shift from the book. Atwood's The Testaments jumps 15 years past the end of the original Handmaid's novel. But since the TV show kept going long after Season 1 reached the novel's endpoint, the series has to compress things. If you trace it from Handmaid's Season 1 to The Testaments, you're looking at roughly six to seven years — and most of that math comes down to how old the new leads are.

The Big Timeline Tweak: Everyone's The Same Age Now

Atwood's book rotates between three narrators — Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy — and by the time Daisy really factors in, Agnes is an adult. The Hulu version streamlines all that by putting them around the same age and running their storylines in parallel. It's cleaner on TV, but it ripples through a lot of details the book handled differently.

• Book vs. show timing: the novel is set 15 years after Handmaid's; the series lands about four years after Boston falls in Season 6.
• Control of the map: Gilead still holds large parts of the U.S. and pushes influence into Canada; armed conflict continues.
• Structure shift: instead of time-staggered narrators, the show aligns Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy so their plots unfold together.

Agnes, Hannah, and the Age Problem

The show acts coy about Agnes MacKenzie's identity, but if you watched Handmaid's or read the books, you clock it immediately: Agnes is Hannah Bankole, June and Luke's daughter Gilead stole. We know from the original series that Hannah was about five when she was taken and roughly eight in Season 1.

Actor Chase Infiniti told THR that Agnes is 14 in The Testaments Season 1:

"You will see Agnes be a 14-year-old and experience all the 14-year-old things and feelings and thoughts."

Does that line up perfectly with the show's timeline? Not really. In Handmaid's Season 5, June says Hannah would be 12. If The Testaments is four years after Season 6, the math gets messy. Then again, Handmaid's has always had a wonky clock — Baby Holly/Nichole barely aged while multiple seasons and crises rolled by. The writers even bake in a little wiggle room here: in The Testaments Episode 1, Agnes mentions they were not allowed calendars and she is not sure what year it actually is. Translation: expect some age-fudging.

What Changes For Daisy

The age compression hits Daisy even harder. On the show, she is roughly the same age as Agnes, whereas the book positioned her as notably younger. And the biggest swing from the source: in Atwood's novel, Daisy's parents are June Osborne and Nick Blaine. The series has already made it clear that is not the case here — the timeline simply cannot support it. Outside of that parentage shift and the age bump, Daisy's arc should still track broadly with the book's intent.

New episodes of The Testaments drop Wednesdays on Hulu.