“It was just Agnes,” The Testaments creator Bruce Miller told Deadline of the moment Chase Inifniti auditioned for the lead in the Hulu series. The adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s book and the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Agnes’ coming of age as a member of Gilead’s elite.

When she auditioned Infiniti had wrapped filming One Battle After Another, which catapulted her to global attention and the red carpet at the Academy Awards. Last weekend it was the Series Mania purple carpet as Infiniti arrived in Lille for the world premiere of The Testaments. “It was a non-decision,” Miller adds of the casting decision, noting the team were confident they had recruited a breakout star when they brought her on. “Then we were waiting for the rest of the world to notice.”

Series exec producer Warren Littlefield adds that Elisabeth Moss, star of The Handmaids Tale series and an EP on The Testaments also knew they had found their Agnes when they saw Infiniti. “We all agreed; Lizzie Moss, one of our executive producers, was also weighing in on the casting choice. She thought she was spectacular. She had the same reaction we all did, which was, ‘Oh, there’s Agnes.’”

The girls and young women of Gilead are the focus of the show. They are the daughters of commanders and attend an uber-privileged school run by Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd). As Agnes, Infiniti plays opposite Lucy Halliday as Daisy, who is a Pearl, an outsider who has been permitted entry into the Aunts’ domain. “Season 1 is an awakening,” Littlefield says. “That’s the only world they’ve ever known and they’re not fully aware of the horrors of it just yet. Readers and followers of ‘The Handmaid’s’ Tale’ and readers of ‘The Testaments’ may know more about who Agnes is than Agnes does. We’re going to let them and Agnes catch up.”

If Season 1 is the awakening, the aim is for this to be the first of several new chapters. Miller’s modus operandi is to have a dizzying 200 episodes of a show in his head. In this case that would net out to 20 seasons. He knows The Testaments will not run that long – The Handmaid’s Tale made it to 66 – but hopes to tell a story that spans multiple seasons: “I’m trying to be realistic and my sense in this environment is say 30, 40, 50 episodes.”

The iconic red cloaks of The Handmaid’s Tale are gone and The Testaments presents a rich color-coded world where the older girls wear purple and the Pearls are clad in white. Littlefield says the series is a companion piece to its forbear but also a standalone “The world has moved on from events of the earlier series. We didn’t want to do Season 7 of The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s different time, a different [color] palette. It’s no longer the point of view of June, now it’s the point of view of these young women.

“If you know the mothership, great, but you don’t need to. You can come to this fresh. It’s its own original experience.

For many readers ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘The Testaments’ continue to hold a mirror up to the present day. Miller says of the new series that “it’s fairly relatable to our world.” Despite the horrors inflicted upon women by Gilead, the message is one of hope. “The young women coming of age and having grown up in that world are full of rebellion… it’s the irrepressible energy and the power and the optimism of the young.”

Littlefield says the hopeful element is essential: “Margaret saw what a future might be [in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’]. And then in 2018 she’s writing ‘The Testaments’, published in 2019, and we go ‘How did you do this, how did you put your finger on, not just on America but the world. And then also give us hope, and through these young women illuminate that maybe there’s a path forward.”