“The Testaments” Season 1 finale, which began streaming today, includes a bittersweet revelation for Elisabeth Moss’ June. “The Handmaid’s Tale” heroine shows up in the episode to try and extract Daisy (played by Lucy Halliday) from Gilead. When Daisy protests, citing how great the young women she’s met are, she lists them — and one name hits June like a freight train: Agnes.

As “Handmaid’s” viewers know, Agnes MacKenzie is the name that Chase Infiniti’s character was given years ago, after she was ripped away from her birth parents, June and Luke. Before then, she went by the name they’d given her at birth: Hannah.

“What’s she like?” June wonders as she starts to cry. She later asks if Hannah/Agnes is happy. The last intel June had about her daughter, she was living in Colorado; the news that she’s so much closer, yet still unattainable, is an ironic surprise. Meanwhile, later in the hour, Agnes learns from her drunkenly loose-lipped stepmother, Paula, and her schoolmate, Daisy, that she’s June’s daughter. The news stirs something in Agnes, who goes to her secret store of mementos and pulls out a piece of paper on which she secretly wrote “HANNAH” as a young girl. (Read a full recap of the episode.)

The fact that June now knows exactly where her long-lost child is doesn’t change much, Moss tells TVLine. Remember in “The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 4, when June was tortured by being brought to a room where Hannah was being held in a glass box? In addition to worrying for her daughter’s safety, June was destroyed by the realization that the girl didn’t really remember her and in fact was afraid of her.

Moss recalls the scene well; that episode was also her first as a director. Hannah “didn’t know who she was, and she was cowering from her,” she says. “Then imagine another six or seven years have passed or whatever it is, so absolutely: It’s a very complicated thing of you can’t just now walk back in and be like, ‘Hi, you’re my daughter. I’m taking you back.’ She’s gonna be like, ‘Who the f**k are you?!’” Moss chuckles. “Understandably!”

Extracting Agnes right now would be ‘complicated,’ Moss says

Courtesy of Hulu
Elisabeth Moss, who also is an executive producer on the Hulu series, points out that Agnes/Hannah is now a teenager who “has a whole life,” and “there are elements of that life that are not great, but she’s also not destitute. She lives in a nice home. She has friends.” And the biggest hurdle: “She’s also somewhat brainwashed by the Gilead structure. So, yeah: It’s complicated.”

Moss had a surprise cameo in “The Testaments” series premiere and also appeared in Episode 3, as June served as Daisy’s Mayday liaison after Gilead operatives killed the girl’s adoptive parents. “Getting to play her again after even just a couple of months [since “The Handmaid’s Tale” finished filming] was dreamy,” she says. “It just feels so good. I loved playing her so much, and it just feels — I don’t know, there’s something so comforting about it.”

June is “so strong, and she’s so cool,” Moss adds. “I just like her so much, and to get to be that person again… I love it.”

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Read More: https://www.tvline.com/2182587/the-testaments-season-1-finale-elisabeth-moss-interview-june-agnes-hannah-rescue/