Agnes, June's daughter played by Chase Infiniti, here with Daisy, played by Lucy Halliday, in 'The Testaments.'

Disney/Russ Martin

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[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the three-episode premiere of The Testaments.]

The Handmaid’s Tale viewers (including this writer) had one big question going into sequel series The Testaments: How would June factor in?

The character who Elisabeth Moss made a household name ended The Handmaid’s Tale series on a mission to never give up fighting for her first daughter, Hannah/Agnes, who was taken by Gilead. But June vowed to do it secretly by continuing to lead the resistance movement called Mayday, and Moss and the show’s creative team behind the groundbreaking Hulu hit sealed their lips about if June’s ending meant she could appear onscreen when the Gilead universe returned with The Testaments.

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Now that The Testaments — the next Hulu and MGM adaptation of Margaret Atwood‘s follow-up novel to The Handmaid’s Tale — has released its first three episodes, the secret is finally out: June is back! She’s revealed in the final moments of the premiere in what creator Bruce Miller calls below a superhero-like introduction, and her connection to this new story is explained in the third episode, when she becomes the Mayday handler for Daisy (Lucy Halliday), the new character who enters Gilead as an undercover “Pearl girl” who befriends June’s taken daughter, Agnes (Chase Infiniti). It’s not made clear yet, however, if June even knows that she sent Daisy to where her daughter is being raised in Gilead.

Below, Miller, creator of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, spills on when they made the call to bring June back onscreen, if Moss needed any convincing (hint: she didn’t) and how they kept this massive secret. “You really want those scenes to feel particularly epic,” he tells THR. “There’s an aspect of superhero to June that we wanted to have in this, because her shadow is over the whole show. She’s looming over the whole thing.”

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The biggest question I tried to get out of you at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale — which you wouldn’t tell me! — was if June would appear in The Testaments. I’m very excited to see that she does. When did you decide that June would have a role in this show?

There are a couple of answers. From the beginning, I felt like June would end The Handmaid’s Tale with certain business unfinished, so if you were going to tap back into Gilead, you would want to know what June was doing. She’s doing something — she hasn’t retired from dramatic operation. It just made sense. Even in the book, The Testaments, June is operating from the outside. You just don’t see her. So that was always an option.

June would always be in this show. It’s a show about her daughter, and she certainly would be very curious about what happened and would be as influent in that life as she could be. It made sense. Then, of course, Elisabeth [Moss] was such a creative partner on The Handmaid’s Tale with me and Warren [Littlefield, executive producer]. She directed and we worked as closely as you could possibly work with anybody. She was absolutely spectacular. So the chance to bring her back in this role came from the fact that she came back in all her other roles. She’s an executive producer on this show. She’s our creative partner. It really did feel like if we had the opportunity, we could bring June into the show in a very natural way because we didn’t have to make a June show. We could bring her in when she affected one of our other stories.

June (Elisabeth Moss), at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, vowed to never stop fighting for the return of her first daughter Hannah, who was renamed Agnes when she was taken by Gilead. Viewers meet Agnes, played by Chase Infiniti, in The Testaments.

Disney/Steve Wilkie

Did Elisabeth Moss need any convincing to play June again?

I don’t think it took much arm twisting to get Elisabeth say yes. (Laughs.) She very kindly was enthusiastic, and I was thrilled. It is one of the great pleasures of my creative life to watch her do what she does, and to watch it any more times is really great. But I definitely feel like the “business unfinished” that we have with June is part of what this show is about, and to see how that ends up — it would be weird having Agnes be this concerned about who her mother was if we never even saw her mother.

When it came to figuring out how many episode

'The Testaments' Premiere: Creator Explains June Return, Sequel Role