How Old Are Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia in Hulu’s ‘The Testaments’? Here’s the Full Character Age Breakdown

Hulu’s ‘The Testaments‘ has arrived, pulling viewers back into the suffocating world of Gilead with a fresh lens pointed squarely at its youngest inhabitants. Based on Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel, the series is set in Gilead and follows Aunt Lydia alongside two young women with complicated, intertwining stories, and the ages of those characters matter more than you might first realize.

The spinoff premiered on Hulu in April 2026, following the conclusion of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ in May 2025, and picks up years later with a new generation navigating life in Gilead. But how old are the main characters when audiences first meet them? The answer is a little more layered than the show lets on, and it differs significantly from what fans of Atwood’s source material would expect.

Agnes Is 14 Years Old in ‘The Testaments’

Agnes is 14 years old in the TV series and is June’s daughter. She is a privileged, devout Commander’s daughter attending Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory school, where girls are groomed for obedient roles as wives. For a character carrying so much narrative weight, that relative youth adds a quiet intensity to every scene she occupies.

Chase Infiniti stars as Agnes, the biological daughter of June Osborne, the central character of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. With little recollection of her life before Gilead, Agnes is preparing for her future through the regime’s strict expectations. Infiniti, who came to wider attention through roles in ‘Presumed Innocent’ and ‘One Battle After Another’, brings a layered quality to the role that makes Agnes feel far older than her years.

Agnes serves as the series narrator. She is a Vidala School student from Colorado who becomes a “Plum” in the Republic of Gilead, narrating about her experiences and how she matured from a naive girl into a skeptical young woman. That internal arc, from compliance to quiet resistance, is what gives her storyline its emotional backbone throughout the series.

Showrunner Bruce Miller described the show as being about “Mean Girls growing up Gilead,” and at 14, Agnes represents exactly the age at which Gilead begins to tighten its grip on its daughters the hardest. It is a deliberately uncomfortable place to begin a coming-of-age story.

Daisy Is Around 15 to 16 Years Old in ‘The Testaments’

Daisy is around 15 to 16 years old in the TV series. She arrives as an outsider and convert, a “Pearl” girl who has some secrets related to the rebellion efforts. Her outsider perspective gives the series one of its most useful narrative tools, letting the audience see Gilead through the eyes of someone who was not raised inside its walls.

Daisy is Agnes’ Vidala School classmate, a seemingly naive woman from Toronto. Flashback sequences reveal that she is actually a revolutionary with an agenda to protect. Scottish actress Lucy Halliday, who earned recognition for her breakout work in ‘Blue Jean’, plays the role with the kind of controlled stillness that makes her character’s double life feel completely believable.

The series follows young teens Agnes, dutiful and pious, and Daisy, a new arrival and convert from beyond Gilead’s borders, as they navigate the gilded halls of Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory school. Their proximity in age is not an accident. It is a creative decision that shapes the entire emotional register of their relationship on screen.

Since these two girls are close in age, their friendship feels natural and equal. That balance between Agnes and Daisy is central to why the series works as a coming-of-age story rather than simply a political thriller dressed up in younger clothes.

Aunt Lydia Is in Her 60s in ‘The Testaments’

Aunt Lydia is a plain-looking woman appearing to be in her 60s in the series, and is portrayed by actress Ann Dowd. While Agnes and Daisy represent Gilead’s future, Aunt Lydia embodies its dark institutional memory, and her age is part of what makes her simultaneously formidable and, in ‘The Testaments’, newly vulnerable to scrutiny.

Aunt Lydia returns as head of the elite preparatory school for future wives that Agnes and her friends attend. On the surface, she is devoted to Gilead’s religious mission, but her intentions are not always what they seem. In ‘The Testaments’, audiences find out more about Aunt Lydia’s past, motivations, and plans for the future. The flashback sequences exploring her pre-Gilead life have quickly become some of the most talked-about material in the series.

Dowd, who is 70, told Obsessed: The Podcast of her first reaction to reading the script for ‘The Testaments’, “I was stunned by it, and deeply grateful because boy did it answer some questions.” That enthusiasm translates directly to the screen, where Dowd’s performance carries the moral weight of the entire franchise.

Dowd declared that she “wasn’t ready to give up” playing Aunt Lydia after portraying her for six seasons on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, so she eagerly welcomed returning to the role for ‘The Testaments’. Her presence anchors the generational contrast at the heart of the show, connecting the older regime to the teenagers it is trying to shape.

Why the Character Ages Are Different From the Book

The story in the novel is split into three viewpoint characters, Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy, and by the time the last of those comes into the story, Agnes is already an adult. The Hulu series is streamlining this by having the characters around the same age, and their storylines playing out together rather than with any degree of separation. That compression changes the entire feel of the narrative.

The TV adaptation has made notable timeline adjustments from Atwood’s 2019 novel so that the story aligns with the events of Hulu’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ series, which concluded in 2025. One of the most significant of those adjustments touches directly on how old the young leads are when the audience first meets them.

Series creator Bruce Miller told The Hollywood Reporter, “We’re definitely trying to follow the overall story of the book, but the ins and outs of the actual storyline are difficult because characters are different ages, and we had to redefine the Daisy character to keep things practical in our world.” That candid admission confirms that the age changes were a conscious structural decision rather than an oversight.

The reason the show had to recalibrate ages comes down to the complicated relationship between the Hulu series and Atwood’s novels, with the TV adaptation having long overtaken where the original story had ended, which means some changes to ‘The Testaments’ were necessary.

The result is a version that feels dramatically cohesive even if longtime readers of the book will notice the differences almost immediately. If you have been watching Agnes and Daisy navigate Gilead’s prep school from hell, share what you think about the decision to age the characters down and whether it has changed how you connect with their stories.