We’re just a few short days from the premiere of HBO’s next big show: The Last of Us. Based on the critically acclaimed video game series by Naughty Dog, The Last of Us is a zombie story that follows Joel (Pedro Pascal), a hardened survivor who must escort a teenage girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a post-apocalyptic United States in the hopes that her miraculous immunity to the zombie plague can be used to synthesize a cure.
With the show’s release imminent, HBO is kicking their marketing machine into high gear. This week Ramsey appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live to hype up the show. It was a fun little interview, which you can watch right here:
Bella Ramsey hasn’t watched Pedro Pascal’s death scene in Game of Thrones
Before The Last of Us, both Pascal and Ramsey appeared in HBO’s hit fantasy show Game of Thrones; he played Oberyn Martell in season 4 and she played Lyanna Mormont in seasons 6-8. Ironically, they also suffered a somewhat similar fate; Oberyn Martell’s head was squished by the Mountain, while Lyanna Mormont was crushed to death by a zombie giant during the battle against the White Walkers at Winterfell.
However, Ramsey hasn’t seen all of Thrones, especially the earlier seasons before she was on the show. That includes the episode where Oberyn meets his untimely demise at the hands of Ser Gregor Clegane. After Jimmy Kimmel started to nerd out about the brutal “pop” sound effect that accompanied Oberyn’s head being turned to mush, Ramsey mused that maybe she should finally watch the scene. “I don’t know if you should,” Kimmel laughed. “How attached are you to Pedro ?”
“I’m pretty attached, probably unhealthily attached to him,” Ramsey said. Kimmel immediately started backpedaling, not wanting to suggest she watch her costar’s death if it would upset her, but Ramsey just shrugged it off. “I’ll just text him like two minutes later, and then he won’t reply for a while.”
As for Ramsey’s own death in “The Long Night,” she revealed that unlike many other actors on the show, she never received the infamous phone call from D.B. Weiss and David Benioff to let her know she was going to be killed off, likely because there’s no need when you die in the last season. Instead, her mom read it in a script one night and excitedly told her that she would be killed off the following morning. Ah, the actor’s life.
Bella Ramsey is used to humoring fans who were upset by the end of Game of Thrones
Ramsey also shared some pretty fun stories, such as the fact that while she hasn’t seen all of Game of Thrones, people are more than happy to come up to her on the street to ask her what she though of the show’s much-maligned ending.
“I ask them back, ‘what did you think of it?'” Ramsey explained. “I just let them either hate on it or talk about how great it was…mostly hate on the ending for like 10 minutes and I just sit there and listen and say ‘goodbye, nice to meet you,’ and then that’s it. Generally the consensus is that it wasn’t great, but it seemed fine to me.”
You can catch Bella Ramsey as Ellie in The Last of Us this Sunday, January 15 on HBO and HBO Max.
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