Chase Infiniti Takes Us Behind the Scenes of a Gilead Prom in 'The Testaments'

Emma FraserWed, April 22, 2026 at 6:00 PM UTC

0

Chase Infiniti Talks Prom in GileadSteve Wilkie

Spoilers below.

The Handmaid’s Tale reminds Chase Infiniti of high school. Thankfully, that’s not because her experience was anything like that of her character Agnes MacKenzie in the sequel series The Testaments, set four years after the fall of Boston in Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s seminal 1985 novel. Infiniti remembers the day the Elisabeth Moss-starring show premiered in 2017. “I was 17, and it took over my high school,” Infiniti, now 25, tells ELLE on the phone. “Everyone was watching it, and of course, you read The Handmaid’s Tale when you’re in school.” Infiniti drew on memories of this time for episode 5, which sees Agnes and her friends hit an important adolescent milestone: prom.

This being the Aunt Lydia School in Gilead means they don’t use that word. Instead, the more refined term “ball” is used. There is no contemporary music or even teen boys the same age as Agnes at the debutante-style event, which is held in the same hall where the girls eat lunch (and witness men being punished for their sins). Rather than a hallmark of adolescent frivolity, the purpose of the formal occasion is for girls like Agnes, i.e. the “Plums” who have recently graduated to “Greens” (on account of having their first period), to get matched with an adult (and often much older) commander who will become their husband—whom they will dutifully love, honor, and obey.

The pressure on Agnes is high, but for the briefest moment, she has a “best night of her life” encounter with her crush amid the Gilead pomp and circumstance. “I guess the way I approached it was by pulling from my experiences,” Infiniti says of filming the scenes with Agnes’s nervous and excited classmates. “My prom was completely different from how it was in the show. But I just remember spending the entire night with my friends. It was a really special night, and one that I won’t forget, because I really was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the best night of my life.’”

One particularly striking difference between Infiniti’s high school prom and Gilead’s teen formal? A hypnotic dance routine involving the entire student population to kick off the event. In the episode, titled “Ball,” director Quyen Tran uses an overhead shot—a signature from The Handmaid’s Tale—to illustrate that the girls look like a blossoming flower to the Commanders watching from the balcony above. The choreography also resembles a May Queen dance à la Midsommar, but without the maypole or flower crowns.

A scene from The Testaments episode 5, “Ball.”Steve Wilkie

Infiniti studied musical theater at Columbia College Chicago, a private arts college in the Windy City, and was giddy when she learned there would be rehearsals for this intricate Testaments sequence. “I was jumping off the walls because I could not wait to get in the studio and learn this choreography to any degree,” she says. TV production moves at a fast pace, which is why the cast had only one five-hour session to get the steps down as a group before they had to rehearse the sequence solo. “We finished it; [they] recorded it for us to practice over a weekend or two,” Infiniti remembers. “Then we did a rehearsal or two in the morning before we shot it, and then that was that. We only had one major rehearsal.” The dance number begins with a father-daughter duet (Agnes settles into the waltz with her adoptive father, Commander MacKenzie, as played by Nate Corddry). Then the potential suitors arrive, each of them with steps fresh out of Regency England.

Everything Agnes has been taught has been leading to this defining moment. The girls who attend the elite preparatory academy run by Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd reprising her Handmaid’s Tale role) are trained from a young age to become the best wives to be paired off as spouses to Gilead’s powerful High Commanders. The ball is a significant part of the process in assigning who each girl will marry. Having gotten her first period in the season premiere, Agnes is eligible to wed and, somewhat reluctantly, undertakes the final part of her pre-engagement education. Little does Agnes know that her birth mother, June (Moss), is the symbol of the Mayday resistance, fighting to bring down the authoritarian regime—nor does Agnes know that her birth name is Hannah. All Agnes knows of her origin story are hush-hush details involving a rebel handmaid, alongside taunts about her weak genes from her stepmother, Paula (Amy Seimetz).

Chase Infiniti as Agnes in The Testaments.Steve Wilkie

Viewing this world through fresh eyes is teenager Daisy (Lucy Halliday), who is sent to Gilead from Toronto by June as part of a Mayday resistance operation to infiltrate all avenues. Daisy masquerades as a convert known as a “Pearl girl” (who tend to be more fanatical in their devotion to Gilead) and is paired with Agnes at the school.

At first, Agnes and her friends Becka (Mattea Conforti), Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard), and Huldah (Isolde Ardies) are suspicious of Daisy because “Pearl girls” are more likely to report any misdeeds back to Aunt Lydia. But by the time of the dance, most of the girls are warming to the newcomer, who’s proven she can be trusted with secrets. Off-screen, Infiniti quickly connected with Halliday, who was flying in from Scotland. “I called her when we both landed in Toronto,” Infiniti recalls. “I was like, ‘Girl, let’s go grab dinner.’ Because we were both in a foreign city we’ve never been to, and we both were feeling a bit nervous about being there. I remember I was like, ‘I’m gonna make sure that even if we both feel really uncomfortable in this moment, that we know that we have each other.’” Infiniti fondly remembers the frequent dinners on weekends with her co-stars and hanging out at Conforti’s apartment. “The friendship that the girls have on screen is the same as what we have off-screen as well,” she says.

In the latest episode, however, bonds are put to the test as Agnes conceals a painful secret from her best friend Becka, which strains their dynamic. “I feel like it was very easy to get close with Mattea, which made it very easy for us to bring Agnes and Becka’s relationship to life in that way,” Infiniti says. “It is heartbreaking when we get to [episode] 5, and we see that they’ve been so close up to this moment, and to Becka, there’s this unknown distance between them, and she doesn’t understand what happened.”

Advertisement

Mattea Conforti as Becka and Chase Infiniti as Agnes.Steve Wilkie

In the previous episode, Agnes needed emergency dental work from Becka’s father, the go-to dentist for the Gilead elite. While under sedation, Dr. Grove (Randal Edwards) sexually assaults Agnes for a second time (in the premiere, he purposely grazes her chest). “It is very sad to see they’re not talking in the same way, but it’s also heartbreaking to know exactly why, because of what Becka’s father has done to Agnes,” Infiniti explains. “I remember really feeling for Agnes in those moments and feeling for Becka because there’s so much that they want to tell each other, but they just don’t feel like they can.”

Becka is going through her own crisis: She is in love with Agnes, and the thought of marrying a man makes her want to crawl out of her own skin—or at least run away. When a Commander plies Becka with booze at the dance, she drunkenly confesses to Daisy that she has romantic feelings for Agnes. But Agnes only has eyes for a young Guardian (sworn to protect her family) called Garth Chapin (Brad Alexander), who is secretly working for Mayday and is Daisy’s handler. When the powerful Commander Weston (Reed Diamond) is called away on urgent business mid-dance with Agnes, he asks Garth to step in as her partner, much to Agnes’s delight. “I think that scene is so precious because you see how excited she is to just be near him,” Infiniti says.

Given Gilead’s plan for teens like Agnes, this marks a rare opportunity to feel this intense rush of genuine yearning. When Infiniti was working on the scene with Alexander, they discussed Agnes’s cute reaction to this fantasy moment coming to life. “We both remember what it was like to be that age and have a crush on somebody that intensely, especially when you’re 14,” she says. “We went through different versions of the scene, and what it ended up on was this perfect mix of excitement and anxiety, but also just so much fascination from not only her, I would say him as well.” At the end of the episode, Agnes learns that Garth is being promoted to a Commander, and suddenly the idea of marriage doesn’t seem so bad. If only she could find a way to get paired with him.

That avenue is unlikely, as Agnes is expected to wed a Commander with a level of power similar to her father’s, and her stepmother, Paula, will pull out all the stops to make this happen. While June is Agnes’s birth mother, the only mom that Agnes remembers is Tabitha MacKenzie (Amy Landecker), Commander MacKenzie’s kind first wife. But Tabitha died from an unspecified illness between the events of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, and Commander MacKenzie remarried. Paula oozes with disdain during any interaction with Agnes and sees the teenager as an irritant whose only commodity is marrying well. But off-screen, Seimetz and Infiniti’s dynamic is “completely different from Paula and Agnes.” Infiniti explains, “One of my favorite things about her is that she brought so much life into Paula—even more than what was already on the page. I love the way that she portrayed the character, and found almost comedic bits with her.”

Amy Seimetz (left) plays Agnes’s stepmother, Paula.Steve Wilkie

Infiniti hasn’t had any screen time with Moss yet (who has appeared in two episodes so far) but is eager to act opposite the two-time Emmy winner. Still, Moss made herself readily available to the cast: “She said, ‘If you ever need anything, please just let me know I’m here for you. You’re not in this alone. If you ever have questions about Gilead, and you don’t want to ask, I am 1,000 percent here to help you,’” Infiniti recalls. “She truly knows everything about the world.”

While Dowd is the only original cast member returning as a season regular, many of the Testaments crew also worked on The Handmaid’s Tale, and so are used to the demands of the material. “I think in general, we kept it pretty light very easily,” she says. “Even though you’re dealing with heavy material, our entire cast and crew was so beyond joyful and kind, and it was very easy not to let the material go home with you at the end of the night, which I was so grateful for.” The team’s emotional support for each other was “the number one thing that helped us all stay mentally safe in that way.”

Infiniti does have a little break coming up, but she is feeling bittersweet thinking about this part of The Testaments promotional tour coming to a close—especially after such a whirlwind year for the actress. Infiniti has spent the last few months making her mark on the red carpet during One Battle After Another’s incredible award-season run, which culminated in six Oscar wins. One of those accolades was for Best Casting, with Cassandra Kulukundis making Academy history as the first person to receive the award. Undoubtedly, casting Infiniti in her first feature-length role as Willa (for which she was nominated for a BAFTA, Golden Globe, and a Critics’ Choice Award) contributed to this win. It has been nonstop for Infiniti since then; the Testaments promotional tour has taken her to Paris, London, Los Angeles, and New York.

Chase Infiniti, Rowan Blanchard, Mattea Conforti and Lucy Halliday visit the Empire State Building in April 2026.John Nacion - Getty Images

When Infiniti spoke to ELLE for a cover story last year, the actress said she had to keep pinching herself as she looked back on her sudden rise. Is she still pinching herself? “Oh, definitely,” she says now. “I also feel so lucky because this entire tour, I’ve gotten to really hang out with a group of girls I love so much, and that made it even more exciting.” On the same April day of our interview, Infiniti posed at the top of the Empire State Building with Testaments co-stars Halliday, Blanchard, and Conforti.

While The Testaments is still awaiting a season 2 renewal, there is plenty of story to tell as Agnes and her classmates navigate the additional perils of adolescence in the dystopian setting of Gilead. At a time when the world Atwood created is looking less and less like science fiction, there is strength to be drawn from these young women at the Aunt Lydia School, who are slowly beginning to push back at the halfway point in the season.

“I hope something viewers take from this [show] is never to lose the confidence in their own voice,” Infiniti says. “It is a coming-of-age story, but something these girls grow into is finding their own voice and their own way to advocate for themselves and each other.” As Agnes learns to navigate this next phase of her Gilead education, her friends will be more vital than ever before if they are to break the traditions. Which leads to another thing Infiniti hopes audiences take away: “Never forgetting that community not only brings us together,” she says. “But it also makes us stronger.” Praise be to that.

You Might Also Like

Here’s What 40 Celebrities Looked Like as Teenagers

Is Collagen Banking the Answer to Younger-Looking Skin?

Trust Us—These Editor-Approved Fragrances Will Have You Smelling Like a Dream

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”