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At a stage in life where most are still discovering their identity, Mattea Conforti has already spent years becoming other people. From the demanding discipline of competitive dance and Broadway stages to the intense environment of television, Conforti’s career is distinguished by a deep-seated respect for the craft.
The American actress (and Harvard student, FYI) doesn’t play Becca with big, sweeping gestures. In Hulu’s TV drama The Testaments, her resistance rarely shows up in grand speeches or overt acts. It, instead, lives in the quiet moments: a hesitation in her step, a silence that lingers just a beat too long, or a glance that betrays everything she’s forbidden to say. Because Becca is a girl growing up in a world that has systematically denied her the language to understand her own heart, Conforti approaches that internal fracture with a knowing.
“I loved how non-external her hesitation and doubt is,” Conforti tells A Shot. “As an actor, it’s such a great challenge to try to tell a story without relying on the dialogue to do the heavy lifting.” And that is exactly the heartbeat of Becca’s journey in The Handmaid’s Tale’s sequel series, which is set about five years after the finale of the original series. While we’re used to dystopian stories that frame rebellion as a loud, explosive thing, Becca’s conflict is claustrophobic and internal.
In Gilead, the regime doesn’t just dictate your chores or your clothes. Gilead, as we know from The Handmaid’s Tale,monitors your feelings, your whole being. For a girl trying to make sense of her own desire, the lack of a framework is paralyzing. “She has no outside reference to label what she’s feeling,” Conforti explains. “The only thing she’d know that differentiates her from the others is being a ‘gender traitor.’ It’s so unfortunate, and so limiting.”
This is where the tragedy of Becca’s relationship with Agnes (played by Chase Infiniti) hits hardest. Their bond has to survive in a space where even the smallest spark of affection is a death sentence. Becca’s feelings are forced to hide behind the “safe” cover of friendship, and Conforti plays this as something private and consuming. “She would do anything for Agnes,” Conforti says. “Her love is unconditional. It’s the driving factor behind everything she does—and everything she chooses not to do.”
What makes Conforti’s performance so sticky is how much of Becca’s life happens beneath the surface. She communicates through a sort of guardedness, making the viewer lean in. Even her moments of breakthrough—like her confession in episode five—feel precarious, as if Becca is unearthing a truth she’s never heard aloud before. “When she finally verbalizes those feelings, it’s the first time she’s being truly honest with herself,” she adds. “She’s stuck in this constant struggle of, ‘How do I label this? Is this okay?’ It’s a ton of pressure.” Ultimately, that’s why Becca sticks with you. She’s fighting for the right to be a person.
Zoom out from the horror of the regime, and Conforti sees something much more universal. If you strip away the Handmaid’s outfits and the Gilead propaganda, she sees girls dealing with the same messy, overwhelming realities of growing up: the shifting friend groups, the crushes, and the terrifying, exhilarating act of defining who you are. “They’re just figuring out who they are,” she says. “Their bodies are changing, they’re questioning their environment. There were so many similarities I could draw from my own adolescence.”
It’s a perspective that explains why these stories keep resonating. Beneath the nightmare of the setting, there is the recognizable truth of the teenage experience—the feeling of being told who you must be while your own voice is still finding its pitch. “There’s nothing more powerful than a teenage girl,” Conforti says.
For Conforti, the ultimate takeaway from the series is the necessity of solidarity. The show is a grim reminder that in a system designed to atomize you, you can’t survive on your own. “If there’s anything the show has taught me, it’s that we need each other,” she says. “There can be no change, no rebellion, if we don’t find our strength in each other first.”
That support system was just as vital behind the camera. Conforti remembers a set that was psychologically gruelling, yet anchored by the cast’s need to look out for one another. Conforti, along with Infiniti, Rowan Blachard, and Lucy Halliday, spent their downtime finding moments of levity to balance out the darkness of the scenes.
Conforti’s understanding of Becca is established in the idea of suppression—not just the political kind, but the emotive kind that cuts deep. Gilead weaponizes femininity while simultaneously policing it, boxing young women into rigid roles before they’ve even had a chance to figure out who they are. What fascinated Conforti most, though, is that Becca doesn’t see the walls of her cage as clearly as we do; to her, this environment is just… life.
“Gilead is all she’s ever known. These rules, these limitations, this education—that’s her reality.” That distinction is key to the performance. Becca isn’t rebelling from a place of political manifesto or ideological awareness. For her, it’s more instinctive—a slow, unsure drift away from expectations she doesn’t fully understand yet. It gives the character a heartbreaking vulnerability; she is trying to survive the confusion of her own adolescence.
“There’s this foundational level of suppression that all these girls are already dealing with,” Conforti says. “But with Becca, there’s that additional layer. She’s trying to come to terms with her sexuality and identity, but she’s not allowed to express any of it.” Conforti leans into the friction between what’s said and what’s held back. She’s hesitant, yes, but she’s also deeply brave in the way she insists on her own perspective. Even the intimacy Becca feels for Agnes is played in code—masked by friendship, loyalty, and the simple, desperate need for proximity.
“It was challenging,” she admits. “I kept thinking, How do I show the audience what she’s feeling if she can’t even admit it to herself?” But even in that suffocating atmosphere, The Testaments leaves room for grace. The series keeps returning to the idea that connection is its own kind of mutiny. Through friendship and solidarity, these girls manage to salvage pieces of themselves that the system tries to strip away.
“She finds support and community through her friends,” she says. “And I hope people watching who might feel similar to Becca understand that they can find that support, too.” It’s a sentiment that lands hard right now. We are in a cultural moment where younger audiences are leaning into stories about belonging and the cost of hiding who you are. While Gilead is a fictional nightmare, the questions underneath it feel uncomfortably close to home: Who are you allowed to become? What parts of your heart are you forced to lock away?
Conforti doesn’t talk about these questions with a cynical distance. She speaks about Becca with a protective empathy—not as a dystopian symbol, but as a real teenage girl balancing fear, desire, and the messy process of growing up. In the end, that’s why her performance hits so hard. Becca’s strength isn’t about being “right” or having the answers; it’s about her vulnerability. Her willingness to feel—to actually feel—is her most major act. “There’s strength in numbers,” Conforti says. “When we lean into community and support each other, that’s where we finally find our power.”
Long before she ever stepped into the halls of Gilead, Conforti’s relationship with acting was built on that same foundation of community and collaboration. She started out as a competitive dancer, a background that she says fundamentally shaped her as both a performer and a person.
“I fell in love with stage presence really young,” she says. “Performing taught me collaboration, discipline, and how to tell stories physically.”
That theatrical training still anchors her approach to the craft, even when she’s in front of a camera. She’s quick to distinguish between the two mediums: for her, theatre is about stamina, movement, and the massive task of projecting an emotional arc from the front row to the back of the house, while film is about pulling the audience in close. “With theatre, you’re running through the whole emotional arc every night in front of a live audience,” she explains. “But with film and television, the camera allows for much more subtle, intimate moments.”
The actress’ sense of subtlety is the real engine behind her work in The Testaments. Becca is a character defined by what she doesn’t say, and Conforti treats silence as its own form of performance—a way to map out fear and longing without needing a monologue to explain it. She’s always gravitated toward roles that demand this kind of evolution, looking for work that doesn’t just ask her to show up, but to grow. “I only want to do roles that challenge me and make me think outside the box,” she says. “The Testaments really did that.”
Growing up in an industry that tends to document every single phase of an actor’s life might make some people protective or wary, but Conforti speaks about visibility with a grounded, almost breezy sense of calm. She’s grown up alongside social media, and she views the public attention as something that’s just part of the landscape—and, more importantly, a conduit to the people who actually care about the work. “There’s visibility and attention that comes with this work, of course,” she says. “But I also wouldn’t be here without the fans who support these stories and these characters.”
She’s clearly touched by the way the audience has latched onto Becca. Seeing viewers analyze the character’s relationship with Agnes and debate the complexities of her inner life is a validating act for the work she put into those quiet, wordless moments. “There’s nothing better than seeing people connect to Becca and think deeply about her relationships,” she says.
That connection speaks to the heart of why the show works. Unlike the archetypal dystopian heroine or the coldness of authoritarian regimes, Becca’s story is burrowed in the much more recognizable loneliness of being a teenager who doesn’t quite know who she is yet. “Margaret Atwood has always been ahead of her time,” Conforti shares. “Her material continues to prove to be timeless.”
When Conforti talks about the character, she’s quick to bridge the gap between Gilead and the real world. Strip away the institutional horror, and you’re left with the universal, messy experience of adolescence. “People sometimes dismiss teenage girls as dramatic,” she says. “But they’re incredibly powerful. They’re questioning themselves, their world, their identity—and that’s not something small.”
The Handmaid’s Tale universe has always landed because it recognizes that control rarely arrives with a bang. It begins in the discreet, insidious spaces: the creeping weight of shame, the eyes of surveillance, the fear of isolation, and the relentless policing of identity. The Testaments shifts that focus squarely onto the adolescent experience, capturing the specific, suffocating tension of growing up while the world tells you exactly who you are required to be.
Even in one of television’s bleakest worlds, Conforti doesn’t play her as defeated. She plays her as someone who knows that empathy, friendship, and love are the only things that can survive the wreckage. A teenager trying to navigate the basics of human existence under a microscope.
