The Last of Us is a 2013 video game about a zombie apocalypse. Joel, a hardened survivor, must escort the teenager Ellie across a zombie-infested United States in the hopes of getting her to a lab where a group of scientists can use her seeming immunity to the zombie plague to create a cure. The game was a huge hit when it came out and is still beloved. HBO is turning it into a series debuting this Sunday, and expectations are high.
Having played the first game and seen the first four episodes of the show, I can say that the HBO series is faithful to the original. That said, there are changes and expansions, as there would have to be whenever a story makes the jump from one medium to another.
One of the most minor changes is that some of the characters are played by actors with different skin tones than they had in the game. For instance, while Joel was a white guy in the game, he’s played on TV by actor Pedro Pascal, who is of Chilean descent. Joel’s daughter Sarah is played by biracial actor Nico Parker.
For most people, this doesn’t matter, but there are always touchy, toxic pockets of fandom that get very quickly offended by anything having to do with race or gender. They’re a small group, but they tend to be loud and unpleasant.
Yahoo! Entertainment asked Pascal about this toxic response, and he seemed pretty unbothered. “Sorry,” he shrugged. “You can’t make everybody happy.”
How The Last of Us cast Pedro Pascal as Joel
Neil Druckmann, who wrote the original games and is producing the series, got more specific. “I saw this story as kind of a love letter to the United States, especially the landscapes,” he said. “America has its problems, but its superpower is that it’s a melting pot of every kind of person from every walk of life. It was important that the show capture that.”
"Sometimes, I think fans can be misguided. They’re hanging onto superficial things and think that if those things change, somehow we’ve got it wrong. But I would like to ask them: When you first played the game and [you met] Sarah, was it her relationship to Joel [that affected you] or that she had blonde hair? What’s important versus what’s not? To me, it was more important to capture the essence of those characters when we cast them."
And when it came to capturing Joel, Pascal fit the bill. Showrunner Craig Mazin said it was important that the actor capture “the weight of his years.”
"We said to Pedro, ‘We want you to play your age.’ Joel is actually older than Pedro in real life, and we wanted his knees to be bad, to run with a little bit of a hitch and to have trouble standing up and sitting down. And when he suffers a wound, that wound is not gone: it carries through into the next episode. That humanity was important to us."
Ellie’s sexuality was always going to be preserved for The Last of Us adaptation
As Pascal and Druckmann both point out, the games have an inclusive spirit that carries over to the show. That includes making Ellie a lesbian, something that doesn’t become a focus until the second game in the series, The Last of Us Part II. For the HBO show, they could front that information earlier, even if it isn’t a focus.
Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie, says there was never any danger of leaving out that aspect of the character. “I wouldn’t have let that happen either. It’s part of who she is and what I like about the show is that it’s not made into this huge deal,” she said. “It’s her existing in this world and loving women… and Joel is cool with it. I think it’s done really well.”
The Last of Us premieres this Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.
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