Sometimes, you luck out with a script like The Testaments—the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale and one of the biggest TV shows of 2026—based on the 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. Set 15 years after the events of the former book in the same patriarchal, totalitarian regime of Gilead, where women are stripped of all rights, autonomy and identity, reduced to their reproductive functions and trained in domestic servitude, The Testaments follows a new generation of girls as they come of age. These are girls who end each sentence with “Praise be”; who celebrate getting their period because they are now “fertile”; who believe they are sinners just by virtue of being women who drive otherwise good men to follow lustful urges. To these girls, in their early teens, seeing corpses hanging in public or men’s hands being chopped off for masturbating is normal, even righteous, as is not being allowed to have a best friend because it leads to secret-keeping or being married off to a much older man as soon as they reach puberty. Perhaps this is why, despite having the same claustrophobic brutality as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments’ tone is brighter, more youthful. It is the same dystopian world, now seen through the lens of hopeful young adults.
Pandya, who remembers studying The Handmaid’s Tale in school, plays Miriam, one such girl at an elite preparatory academy in Gilead. “I auditioned in March last year and at the time, didn’t know it was for The Handmaid’s Tale sequel because they had it under a working title,” she recalls. “But I fell in love with the script and characters. Preparing for this role was a lot of reminiscing and grounding myself by thinking, How would I react to this when I was 13 or 14? In Gilead, you’re living in a world of extremes but the themes of The Testaments still aren’t very far-fetched and are actually lived experiences that I found easy to connect with.”
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