In stark contrast to the white robes she dons to play Daisy in The Handmaid’s Tale sequel series The Testaments, when Glamour meets Lucy Halliday at London’s Raffles Hotel she is dressed in all black, her top and trousers peppered with sparkles.
“I’m just trying to catch the attention of every light,” she tells me, describing the moment she discovered she’d been cast as “snarky” Daisy in The Testaments as “sheer joy”.
The much-awaited series adapted from Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, sees two young women from very different worlds join together to resist Gilead’s repressive regime. One Battle After Another’s Chase Infiniti plays Agnes, and we see her life changed forever by the arrival of Halliday’s Daisy, who infiltrates Gilead after her own life is destroyed by the regime’s violence.
Disney
A BAFTA already under her belt, Lucy’s performance in The Testaments poises her for even higher levels of greatness. This month you can also catch her in James McAvoy’s directorial debut California Schemin’, which tells the (true) story of two Scottish rappers from Dundee who fool the entire music industry that they’re a Californian rap duo. Lucy, co-starring with Peaky Blinders star Amber Anderson plays Mary, a partner-in-crime of the two rapper fraudsters.
To say Lucy had big shoes to step into is an understatement, and she’s been frank about the responsibility she feels, especially because The Handmaid’s Tale “has already enacted such an important movement in reality”. Nevertheless, she has stepped in and made her mark. “The Handmaid’s Tale team have really welcomed both Chase and I into their world, and I feel very honoured to have been welcomed in,” she says.
The novel came out while Lucy was still in school and was a talking point among her friends. “I was such a massive Margaret Atwood fan growing up, and I devoured her books,” she says of her earliest memories of The Handmaid’s Tale universe. She describes meeting Atwood as the only time she has ever been starstruck, and watching preview episodes of The Testaments “elbow to elbow” with the author. “It was one of the most out of body experiences of my life,” she says.
Both the book and TV series – the latter of which stars Elisabeth Moss as protagonist June – have become synonymous with political protests and movements in real life. What started out as a speculative novel became a cautionary tale of the erosion of women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, made further poignant particularly by the overturning of crucial US abortion legislation Roe vs Wade back in 2022.