Every actor from The Last of Us games who appeared on the show (and who they played)

6. Laura Bailey (Abby) as a nurse

We end with the most subtle cameo of them all. During Joel’s rampage through Saint Mary’s Hospital in the season finale, he eventually comes face-to-face with the surgeon who was planning to kill Ellie in order to create a cordyceps cure. Joel guns the surgeon down without hesitation before ordering the two panicked nurses who were going to assist in the surgery to unhook Ellie from the medical equipment so that he can take her away. One of those nurses is played by Laura Bailey, who also voiced one of the nurses in this scene in the video game.

However, Bailey played a much more pivotal role as a very different character in The Last of Us Part II: Abby Anderson. We’re not going to discuss who exactly Abby is here because it would mean getting into huge spoilers, but suffice it to say she’s an important player in this story, and she has ties to what happens in that operating room.

Bailey clearly had a lot of fun stepping into this scene; check out this picture she sent to Neil Druckmann which, uh…has some relevance to the second game. If you know you know:

Bailey’s cameo came in right under the wire: Mazin and Druckmann revealed on The Last of Us Podcast that it wasn’t originally planned. With only a few days left of shooting, Mazin and Bailey got to talking about how she could appear in the show and she flew out to film the scene.

“This is how cool Laura [Bailey] is,” Mazin recalled. “I’m like, ‘Look, we’re down to the final days of our production, it’d be so awesome to get you in there. Here’s what I got. What I got is a nurse. But the nurse is wearing a surgical mask.’ And she’s like ‘That’s even better, I’ll just be like this secret cameo that no one knows about.’ And now everyone does.”

Ironically, when Mazin offered Bailey the cameo as one of the nurses he had no idea that she also played that part in the first game, only that she played Abby in the second. You can hear his shock on the podcast when Druckmann shares that little detail.

According to Druckmann, the game version of this scene was the first time he ever worked with Bailey, and he enjoyed it so much that he enlisted her to be one of the main characters in the sequel. We’ll see how the show handles Abby next season, but for now, it’s cool to have this link.

All nine episodes of The Last of Us season 1 are available now to stream on HBO Max. Season 2 is expected to begin filming later this year.

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