The Canadian actress has now played that role twice, in Wayward and in The Testaments, and the reactions have not lined up.
Isolde Ardies has now played two teenagers who believe completely in the systems built to control them, first Stacey in Netflix’s Wayward, then Hulda in Hulu’s The Testaments. Neither performance produced a simple reaction.
A character who doubts an institution keeps the audience at a slight distance from its logic. One who has fully bought in removes that distance, splitting viewers rather than handing them a clear villain to root against.
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Stacey Turned Wayward Into a Show People Argued About
Wayward follows two teenagers pulled into Tall Pines Academy, a boarding school for troubled kids that turns out to be something closer to a cult. Stacey is one of its senior students. She has fully absorbed the school’s rules and uses her standing to enforce them on the kids beneath her. The show never quite makes her the villain. She’s a kid who found approval inside a broken system and isn’t ready to give it up.
One fan on the Wayward subreddit wrote that the performance kept Stacey from feeling like a flat, predictable character. They pointed to her expression in the finale, when Stacey finally leaves the school, as looking like “an elated little kid.” A different commenter on that same thread, who said they had gone through a real program similar to the one Tall Pines is loosely based on, read the scene as a problem instead. They felt the show let Stacey’s arc off too easily, without reckoning with what a place like that actually does to a kid.
Both readings are responses to the same choice, playing devotion as something a person can genuinely feel good about instead of as an obvious warning sign. Under Ardies’ own Instagram posts, the reaction skewed toward the first kind. One fan wrote that her acting “made me hate Stacey so much,” meaning it as a compliment. Wayward holds a mixed 78 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes across 54 reviews, and a DVDfever review, otherwise unconvinced by the show, still made room to call Stacey “brilliantly entertaining.”
The Testaments Gave Her a Second Version of the Same Role
Ardies signed on to play Hulda in The Testaments on April 1, 2025, the same day Hulu officially greenlit the series, according to Deadline. Wayward had not premiered yet. Landing a role in one of the year’s most watched new dramas before her breakout had even reached an audience is unusual. It suggests the people casting The Testaments were not waiting to see how Wayward would land.
Timeline
- April 1, 2025: Cast in The Testaments, the day Hulu greenlit the series
- September 25, 2025: Wayward premieres on Netflix
- March 31, 2026: The Testaments holds its Los Angeles premiere
- April 8, 2026: The Testaments premieres on Hulu
- May 20, 2026: The Testaments renewed for a second season
The Testaments is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, following a new generation of girls coming of age inside Gilead. Ardies plays Hulda Marie Edwardson, one of the young women being groomed for marriage at Aunt Lydia’s academy. Where Stacey enforces a system on other people, Hulda is simply thrilled to be inside one. The character is written as naive and hopeful, someone who is not hiding her enthusiasm for the future Gilead has planned for her.
The show premiered on Hulu with three episodes on April 8, 2026, followed by seven more released weekly through late May. Reviews were largely positive, and Hulu renewed the series for a second season after the first passed 45 million hours streamed worldwide.
Ardies attended the Los Angeles premiere at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures that March, calling it her first-ever red carpet in a post afterward. A few weeks after the season wrapped, she posted a photo of herself in regular clothes with a caption that read, simply:
“Not actually a cult member.”
After two roles built around belief, it reads less like a throwaway joke and more like she noticed the same thing everyone watching had.
Neither Role Came With an Obvious Head Start
Before Wayward and The Testaments, Ardies had two credits to her name. She played Viole O’Reilly in a guest spot on the Family Channel series Ruby and the Well, and appeared as a character called Fern in a single 2023 episode of Murdoch Mysteries. She’s Canadian, grew up near Toronto, and finished school at Trinity College School in Ontario in 2022.
Her age and family aren’t part of the public record, at least not that I could find.
One More Season to Play the Believer
The Testaments has already been renewed. A second season means at least one more chance to play this exact kind of role, someone who never doubts the people running her life. So far, audiences have not agreed on whether that is a limitation or the thing she does best.
