Elisabeth Moss Reveals June Osborne Was Always in The Testaments

Elisabeth Moss says june osborne was always meant to be part of The Testaments. That choice turns June’s last chapter in The Handmaid’s Tale into a bridge, not an exit. Moss said she had known for years that the story would keep going, even if the character’s role had to stay secret at first.

Moss and Bruce Miller

“We always knew that June was going to be in it,” Moss said in a new interview. She added that Bruce Miller had told her for years that June was not going to get Hannah out at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, and that Margaret Atwood’s sequel novel followed the same path.

“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,” Moss said. That is the balance the franchise had to strike: give June an ending that works on its own, while leaving room for the sequel series to move her story forward.

Daisy and Hannah

June appeared at the end of the first episode of The Testaments and then throughout season one as a mentor to Daisy, a Toronto girl who infiltrates Gilead as a Mayday operative. By the end of the season, June agrees to let Daisy try her own tactics with an emphasis on minimizing collateral damage, which keeps the sequel’s resistance story from becoming a straight continuation of the earlier show.

That turn matters because June is thinking about Hannah, her daughter who was kidnapped by Gilead as a toddler. Hannah is now the same age as Daisy, and in The Testaments she is known as Agnes and is one of Daisy’s closest friends. June realizes Daisy has a direct link to the child she lost, which gives the sequel its emotional hinge.

Season two and beyond

Moss said her casting in The Testaments was kept carefully secret at first, and she could not tell viewers that “June’s story is so not over. The Handmaid’s ending isn’t really even an ending,” as she put it. She also said she and Miller knew she would have multiple The Testaments episodes and “a larger plan for June.”

She is already looking past season one. Moss said it is too early to know how June might factor into season two, but she also said, “I would never want to stop playing her.” For this franchise, that points to a character who is not being retired so much as carried forward into the next phase of the story.