The Testaments: Aussie actor Mabel Li making splash in one of biggest shows of year

In the very first screen project Australian actor Mabel Li shot, an SBS web series called The Tailings, she played a teacher.

Only five years separates The Tailings from Li’s latest role in the buzzy American series The Testaments, but it’s certainly been a step up.

In The Testaments, Li is also a teacher-of-sorts, an “Aunt” in the parlance of the universe the series shares with The Handmaid’s Tale, charged with overseeing the education and development of young women.

By education, that means how to be an obedient, unquestioning wife in a strictly patriarchal dystopia in which Christianity is weaponised to oppress people.

The Testaments is a sequel to the six seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, and it’s not lost on Li that Margaret Atwood’s books on which the shows were based on feel increasingly like reality.

“That was something that was really top of mind for us when we were filming this, is that this is not, in many ways, dystopian,” Li told The Nightly. “It’s real, it’s history, it’s also present now.”

Li’s character, Vidala, has been a constant presence, a supporting character in the lives of its leads, throughout the season, but the latest instalment, episode six, released this week, puts her centre stage.

SPOILERS AHEAD OF EPISODE SIX OF THE TESTAMENTS

Told largely in flashback, we discover why Vidala has such a simmering hostility towards Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia, the connecting character between the two shows.

The sequence is set not long after extremist religious group Sons of Jacob stages a coup d’etat and re-establishes the United States as the Republic Gilead. Vidala and Lydia were shown to be former colleagues, teachers at a school, when they are rounded up and corralled into a stadium with all the other local women.

Arbitrary executions take place in full view as a warning to the others, and thousands of women are kept in squalor conditions in the stands, allotted one piece of bread as food and given no bathroom facilities.

The scene serves to underline why Aunt Lydia would cooperate with the soon-to-be Gileadean high command and how she came to be part of its power structure. It’s the story of individual choices but also speaks to how people act out of fear and self-interested survival.

Vidala is part of the story of Lydia’s rise, but it also gives audiences a greater understanding of Vidala, and how her experiences have dramatically changed who she is to be a complicit part of a horrific regime.

After the episode was released, Li received messages from a lot of people who told them they found it harrowing, and it had made them cry. “And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry’,” she said.

Despite the heaviness, Li said it was “strangely gratifying” to shoot episode six because it allowed her to finally step into more of who Vidala is.

“At that point, I’d spent a couple of months in the present-day Vidala character where she is so tightly wound, stoic and a mouthpiece for the regime,” Li explained.

“It was freeing in a way to explore her from before, even if it’s painful. It was lovely to have her have personal relationships or to see her during a time where she had feelings come up. She’s able to have the space to do that, so that was a release.”

But it was intense to film – the dramatic centrepiece was an executive and it took five hours to shoot – required her to stay in the headspace because to shift in and out of it would’ve been too hard.

But, between every take, “me and Ann would embrace, which was really grounding, and brought us back together.”

Li graduated in the same NIDA class as Sophie Wilde, and was soon after cast as one of the leads in SBS series New Gold Mountain. A raft of local productions followed, including Bay of Fires, Erotic Stories and Safe Home, as well as on stage in Miss Peony and The Seagull.

The Testaments is her first international role, and Li is still bewildered by the attention commanded by a much bigger show. “I’m still like, ‘Oh, people tuned in to watch episode six? What? That’s crazy!’. It’s something I’m wrapping my head around that so many people love this show.”

She had been a devoted viewer of The Handmaid’s Tale, so had watched Dowd embody Aunt Lydia for almost a decade.

“At the first table read, I just had to get it off my chest because I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to be working with her, I just need to say I’m your biggest fan and I’m so excited to work with you, and I think you’re an incredible actor’.

“Once we got over that, it was like, ‘OK, let’s get to work’.”

It helped that she and Dowd had a point of connection: Australian crews. Dowd had spent months in 2018 filming the Australian drama Lambs of God in New South Wales and Tasmania.

“She had so many great things to say about Australian crews,” Li said. “She said, ‘Australian crews are the best, they’re just the best in the world’. She loved working here.”

And Li loved working with Dowd, especially as they spent so much time together, particularly for episode six. Unlike their onscreen counterparts, it wasn’t an experience that fractured their relationship.

“We would just sit there for hours and be immersed in a taste of what it would’ve been like for these women. Ann is lovely, she’s so warm and generous. She’s the best.”

The Testaments is streaming on Disney+