Breaking Baz: With “God’s Blessing,” Ann Dowd Returns As Aunt Lydia In ‘The Testaments’: “I Couldn’t Get Back To Her Fast Enough”

EXCLUSIVE: Ann Dowd declares that she “wasn’t ready to give up” playing the often brutally sadistic Aunt Lydia after portraying her for six seasons on the acclaimed television drama The Handmaids Tale, so she eagerly welcomed returning to her for The Testaments, the sequel to Margaret Atwood‘s dystopian chronicle that premieres Sunday on Hulu.

The Emmy Award-winning artist co-stars with Chase Infiniti — scorching in Oscars Best Picture One Battle After Another — as Agnes, with Lucy Holliday as Daisy (Blue Jean, California Schemin’), both of whom are introduced as students attending Aunt Lydia’s shiny new academy for the daughters of high commanders in Gilead.

What’s special about them will be revealed over time.

The Testaments charts events several years on from the chilling saga that unfolded in The Handmaid’s Tale, which concluded last May.

Dowd describes the morally complex Aunt Lydia, one of the richest dramatic characters on television, as “a complete gift. I can’t believe it. She was brought to her knees at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, deeply remorseful, wanting forgiveness,” acknowledging that she had “done wrong things and awful things” but had “allowed the walls to break and to come down and she was left with nothing.”

Over the intervening years, Aunt Lydia has become “a changed person,” Dowd insists, who has had time to “begin again” by establishing her school.

“It’s a whole different world,” Dowd suggests. “And she enters as a gentler self, that fierceness, that wall is no longer present. Now, it’s there somewhere in her, it doesn’t just disappear, but I think her focus on the school and what she wants the girls to learn about being a hostess, a wife, a mother, a homemaker, all these things. Note, no reading, writing, mind you, no mathematics, imagine that. And rules are rules, and they are enforced, you can be sure, and with God’s blessing.” 

Aunt Lydia’s a through-line that connects both of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead novels. Dowd nods, saying she feels “very privileged for that connection to the past.”

She’s an aunt in maternal guise, really. “True enough. That’s how she treats and loves her girls. She loved them deeply in The Handmaids Tale and thought that they had gone astray in their lives. They had no relationship with God. They were living with men they weren’t married to. These very strict things that Lydia believed in and realized, ‘If I want anything to change, I’m going to have to use force and scare them into it, or they’re not going to listen to a word I’m saying.’ She established that level of ferocity to keep them in line, I think. But loved them just the same, even though I’m sure people who have seen her in the beginning in The Handmaids Tale don’t think of her as loving the girls, but I hope they see it a little bit. I don’t know. Is that fair to ask?”

Her attachment to Aunt Lydia is palpable as we meet for tea (more on what kinda “tea” later) at the sumptuous Raffles Hotel that arose out of the former War Office in Whitehall where Winston Churchill, from a magnificent marble staircase, would address the nation during World War II.

Dowd scolds me, ever so gently, for daring to suggest that the weirdly misogynistic Aunt Lydia behaved malevolently. “No. I never experienced her that way, which the rule is, as an actor, don’t judge,” she reasons.

“There’s a reason why she’s doing what she’s doing. It’s something that she believes in. What does she believe in? What are you going to do and not judge? And that way, the relationship stays open between character and actor. And that’s a wonderful thing. I know it sounds like I’m making up nonsense, but she speaks to me. I speak to her. I’ve come to know her. She has come to know me and I have found her to be tremendously helpful in certain ways in my life,” she reveals with passion.

How so, I wondered?

“In making a decision, standing up and making a decision and not just wallowing in self-pity,” she responds. “Do your homework, make the decision, stick with it. No nonsense, no time for it. Stop it. You don’t need it. You’re this age, you’re that age. Stop.”

“I’ve been reminded of that as I study the role and do each season, so this is the seventh season of knowing her. Which is kind of nice. Imagine having the privilege of knowing a character for seven years.

“You die to do that!” she exclaims.

People used to ask her, she says: “‘How do you play such a character? Do you have to really spend time talking yourself into it?’ And I used to kind of give a vague answer because the truthful answer was: I can’t get there fast enough. That’s the truth. It’s wonderful to play a role like this. It’s not like we go home with the consequences. We don’t. This is make believe for us. I know that sounds like we’re pretending we’re children, but that’s really the idea. It’s not real life. We give it all the qualities we can of real life, but we leave it at the end of a day. And it’s a very fortunate thing that actors get to do. So finally, I just told the truth. I said: ‘I just love it. Can’t get to her fast enough. Those tough scenes when she’s really rough with them, fantastic to play,’” she says gleefully.

Dowd believes that Aunt Lydia’s prime motivation in The Testaments is one of survival, and her story is central to understanding Gilead’s past and its future. We learned in Season 3, episode 8 of The Handmaid’s Tale, in a backstory flashback, that the briefly married Lydia Clements, as she was, practiced family law before becoming a 4th-grade teacher, where she’s shown as being fiercely protective of a young charge, while blasting their sinful mother.

Dowd remembers being taught by Catholic Ursuline nuns, and two of her aunts were also sisters of the same Ursuline order. “They were not anything like Lydia in terms of cruelty or any of that, although they had their ways, but what they did have, what stuck with me was a work ethic. You have a job to do. You don’t walk away from that job until the job is complete. And if you don’t complete it, I will bring you back and you will do so. You are not special. You are just like everyone else who has their part to play and their thing to do. That really stayed with me,” she says as she recalls being hauled out of basketball practice to get back to her duties sweeping a courtyard. 

“And I didn’t dare leave until it was done,” she says.

Her memories of the sisters helped her assemble the psychological architecture needed to build her portrait of Aunt Lydia, turning her into one of television’s most fascinating villains.

“And I found it to be very helpful imagining Lydia… And I imagine she probably was raised just by her father. I made these things up because that made sense to me. He was cold, very religious, but cold to her. Sex was the antichrist. All these things very helpful in determining who she is and why she believes what she believes,” she explains.

It’s no wonder Margaret Atwood was adamant that Bruce Miller, showrunner on both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, not bump off Aunt Lydia and that she must survive that stabbing attack that took place at the end of Season 2. The author, insisted to The New York Times at the time, that Aunt Lydia is “too good to kill.”

Smiling broadly, Dowd acknowledges that she “did hear that,” reasoning that “I think she decided she was going to write a sequel, and maybe getting the character she wants to be alive in her book. So I say humbly, I think she had Lydia in mind, which I’m so grateful for. I wonder if she would have been killed?But anyway, very grateful that she did not. We did not die. And Margaret Atwood, speaking of the horrors that are going on, people have called her a prophet and she says, ‘No, no. I look back to history and everything I say has happened somewhere in this world.’ And that’s just staggering isn’t it?” she says, recoiling in her seat.

“And what do we do about Trump? I’m going into the middle of nowhere here. Sorry,” she says, placing a hand over her mouth.

Where’s the grace gone out of the presidency, I say out loud.

Richard Nixon, for all his faults, showed a sense of grace and dignity when it mattered, I suggest.

“Exactly, exactly. Yes. None here. None here,” Dowd retorts.

The show’s link to contemporary U.S. politics and social welfare is frightening, whether its abortion rights or immigration controls, she says, while admitting, in any event, that she can’t always remember what happened on the shows because she never watched them.

“Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it. I don’t watch,” she insists.

Why, I ask?

“Well, there’s two reasons,” she answers.

“When there is a day where everything you hoped for in the preparation you’ve given, it happens in a given day, it goes well. There’s nothing like that feeling. And you go home at the end of a day like that and you can leave the work at the work place, go home, you have a glass of something and you just can shift what was the day like. That is so profoundly gratifying that when the thought of seeing it, it was like, why would I see it? I did it. It just doesn’t jive for me. I don’t know why. That’s strange. But the other reason, and it’s quite important, I’m embarrassed about it, is the self-criticism. When you watch it and you think, why didn’t I do that? You lose the joy of it because of the pettiness in my mind of, you could have done that or what were you thinking when you … That takes away from the story and the joy. And what’s the point? When I grow up, I’ll watch. That’s what I tell myself.”

She’s always been driven like that as an artist, although not on stage because “well, then you’re in theater, so it’s not about watching.”

Dowd went into acting after giving up medical studies, and her training at acting school, she stresses, was for the theater. “I didn’t do film and television for a while. So it wasn’t about watching or not watching. That was not the choice.”

Acting went gradually for her, she explains. “I’ve been very grateful. I’ve been given the time to get used to something, start with a small role. And character roles, that’s not the lead of the story. So you have space and I had time to understand how it’s done because filming is a very different thing, isn’t it? And it’s a little scary when you think of, what’s happening here? There’s a camera and there are different rules and ways you’re supposed to look and not look, and so on. But the joy of it is, you do get used to it and you do learn how to do it with joy, with trust and not fear. I mean, I always have a little bit of fear. I suppose that’s not a bad thing.”

Brightly, she adds: “But anyway, it’s coming along.”

Appropriately, an early screen credit was a small role in the television movie First Steps in 1985. Her footprint grew larger as filmmakers realized how adept Dowd was at making the presence of her characters felt. Her Patti Levin in the HBO series The Leftovers is a marvel to re-watch, as are her roles in movies like Compliance, Hereditary and Garden State.

Her greatest feature film performance, I believe, is the one she gives in director Fran Kranz’s 2021 film Mass, about a school shooting and its aftermath. Dowd played the shooter’s utterly broken mother.

In fact, Dowd and I met five years ago in London just when travel restrictions were lifting after the pandemic. We were offered champagne, but “I don’t drink on the job,” I somewhat piously protested.

“Neither do I,” she shot back instantly. “I don’t know who I’m kidding,” Dowd had jested as she indicated to our jolly server to pop open the bottle.

Five years on, we repeat the same rigmarole, yet once again. I relent, although I also order a large pot of tea to at least hint at my high intentions.

As we sip our champers, we touch on the Jeffrey Epstein files featuring more wicked, godless men.

“Yes, powerful men still abuse,” she says with a look of disgust, “with impunity. And what do you do with it? I don’t know the answer to the question. It’s mind-boggling. And Andrew Tate, all of that. What in the world is going on? And Roe v. Wade gone. Whoever thought that was going to happen? The hope, of course, is always to move forward and we’re moving backwards. It’s horrible. I mean, I don’t have anything intelligent to say about it.”

We move on to events overseas and she’s suddenly overcome by a wave of sadness. “We are in a bad way, unfortunately,” she laments. “We really are. He’s such a lunatic for the world to see,” her hurt green eyes telling us what she’d rather not say.

Dowd’s face and her voice are her fortune, her instruments in a sense. On stage and screen, they are used to convey a range of emotions. I’ve been lucky enough to catch her work on the boards and I’ve always felt that if she were a Brit, doing work of this calibre, especially in the Atwood adaptations, then she’d be a Dame by now.

Well, in the absence of a dame-hood, The Testaments boasts a statue dedicated to Aunt Lydia. “Oh, God,” Dowd cries, “she has while she is still alive a statue of herself. How about that statue!”

Maybe she’ll get to take it home when the show has ended. “That would be terrifying. Terrifying,” she says with a shudder.

About the show’s future, she is cautious, telling me, “Well, we haven’t been picked up yet. I think it will be. I’m pretty sure that this is going to be picked up… so they’re in the writer’s room now. I mean, not this moment, but they have begun writing it. So, I think it’s soon to come. I’m sure they’d like to have several seasons. There’s a lot to tell.”

Just in case, she’s keeping the fall free to shoot Season 2.

Dowd and Adam Kersh, her longtime manager, are developing several projects, including a screen adaptation of Naomi Wallace’s off-Broadway play Night is a Room, in which Dowd appeared at Signature Theatre in 2015.

It’s also their intention to adapt Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. The eco-crime story was itself turned into the 2017 film Spoor, directed by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland.

A project closest to her heart right now, however, is a book that her husband, the acting coach Lawrence Arancio, is writing called Act Like a Human Being. Dowd explains that it’s based on letters from past students. “And what they learned in acting school” about certain listening and talking exercises, she says. They would thank him profoundly for what he taught them because they’ve used it in real life, even if they’re not actors, how important it is. So he was telling someone about those letters and she said, “‘You should write a book about it. Act like a human being.’ So he’s about a hundred pages in.”