This post contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2, Episode 5, “Seeds.”

This was truly not a great week for Offred/June. Shortly after learning that something might be wrong with her baby, she had to attend Nick’s wedding—to a teenage bride named Eden. Later, Nick found the mother of his secret child lying in a ditch in the rain. Thankfully, he got there just in time: when she woke up in the hospital, Offred learned that both she and the baby are O.K. Then she made a vow to her unborn child: “I will not let you grow up in this place . . . I’m gonna get you out of here. I’m gonna get us out of here.”

First, though, she may have to get past Eden, who grew up under Gilead’s watchful, authoritarian eye—though actress Sydney Sweeney hopes you don’t hate her sanctimonious character too much. After all, this is the only reality she’s ever known.

If Sweeney’s face looked familiar, that’s probably because you’ve seen her as Emaline in Netflix’s Everything Sucks! or in guest spots on series including Pretty Little Liars, The Middle, and Grey’s Anatomy. She might only be 20 years old, but the actress’s IMDb credits stretch back almost a decade. More recently, Sweeney appeared in Under the Silver Lake, which just debuted at Cannes, and she’ll soon pop up in HBO’s upcoming Gillian Flynn adaptation, Sharp Objects.

To prepare for her Handmaid’s Tale role, Sweeney naturally read the original Margaret Atwood novel and binge-watched the series’s first season—then started imagining a backstory for her character, based on what she knew from the script as well as what she could imagine life would be like growing up in Gilead.

“Eden doesn’t know anything else,” Sweeney said during a recent phone interview. As her character told Serena Joy this week, Eden grew up on a farm in a very small town—which indicated to Sweeney that she was probably alone a lot. Thanks to Gilead’s declining birth numbers, Sweeney said, “there weren’t going to be many friends as she grew up. So she grew up more with the horses and the chickens. And cooking for her dad, and learning how to be a good housewife—because when she’s 15, she’s already dreaming of becoming a mother and to become a Commander’s wife.”

Although this week’s big wedding scene, in which a parade of teenage girls walked onto a stage to marry adult men in a ritualized ceremony, might have been chilling to watch, the reality of filming it was more lighthearted. As Sweeney noted, she couldn’t actually see through the white veil she was wearing—and it was an all-day shoot.

“I can’t see anything,” Sweeney said with a laugh, “so half the time I’m bumping into people, or I’m quietly whispering, ‘Nick, where are you? Nick, Nick, where are you?!’”

Offred’s extreme reaction this week was pretty understandable, given her circumstances—especially with Eden present. Although Offred has found solace in her intimacy with Nick up until now, it’s very likely that their secret relationship will have to end—unless the two want to risk getting caught by Eden, who so far seems very deferential to Serena Joy. That inclination on Eden’s part makes sense; after all, as Sweeney mentioned, having a child is her character’s ticket to becoming a Commander’s wife herself. “That is my dream. My aspiration, my goal, everything,” she said. If Eden senses anything amiss, it seems very likely she would tattle on both Nick and Offred in a second.

Still, Sweeney hopes that fans will be able to empathize with her character—although she understands if they can’t.

“I hope that they see that she is just a little girl,” Sweeney said. “She’s still trying to figure out the world, and she doesn’t know what love is. She thinks she knows everything, like most teenagers do—and you fully realize that she doesn’t . . . I hope that people feel for Eden. Even with the choices that she makes, I hope that people will feel for her.”