The second season of The Last of Us is barreling right towards us. Fans of the original Last of Us video game series already have some idea what we're in for; season 2 will adapt The Last of Us Part II, which set the internet on fire when it came out in 2020. As developer Neil Druckmann told Entertainment Weekly, he and members of his team received death threats from fans angry over the twists and turns. Those fans who hopped on for the TV show are about to discovery what the fuss was about.
A lot of that fuss had to do with a new character named Abby, who meets up with lead characters Joel and Ellie (played by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in the TV show) early in the second game. To play Abby, Drunkmann and Craig Mazin — who serve as co-showrunners on the HBO series — cast Kaitlyn Dever, who actually tried out to play Ellie in a never-made movie version of The Last of Us. “We just remained in touch,” Druckmann said. “I believe Craig had the idea of using Kaitlyn for Abby when we talked about season 2. The reason we cast Kaitlyn is because she’s an incredible actor. You look at her body of work and the way she throws herself at that stuff… We value performance over anything else.”
Although The Last of Us Part II was controversial at the time it came out, it's stood the test of time, and there are lots of fans hoping for a faithful adaptation. If the first season of the show is any indication, they'll get it, but Druckmann warns fans that there will be differences, some of which he and Mazin were discussing before Part II even came out; that's how far back the planning for this show goes.
Many of those changes have to do with Abby. For instance, one of the most distinctive things about Abby in the game was her powerful, muscular physique. Kaitlyn Dever, meanwhile, is 5'2" (although she's still bigger than Bella Ramsey, who stands at a towering 5'1").
Druckmann explained that, in the game, the point of making Abby physically imposing was so she could play more like Joel "in the way she can physically manhandle certain things." But we're not going to play the TV show; we're going to watch it. "It's more about the drama. I'm not saying there's no action here. It's just, again, different priorities and how you approach it," Druckmann said.
"Kaitlyn has the spirit of the game in her. What I always loved about the idea was that you are going to continually be challenged as you were in season 1. When you try to pick a hero, it's tough because we're human beings, we're NOT heroes. For every heroic act, there's someone who suffers on the other side who may see you reasonably as a villain. When you look at Kaitlyn, there's just something in her eyes where, even no matter what she's experiencing, you connect. It was important that we found somebody that we could connect to the way we connect to Bella."
Craig Mazin added his two cents about the changes in Abby's character: "I personally think that there is an amazing opportunity here to delve into someone who is perhaps physically more vulnerable than the Abby in the game, but whose spirit is stronger. And then the question is, ‘Where does her formidable nature come from and how does it manifest?’ That's something that will be explored now and later.”
Beware SPOILERS for The Last of Us Part II below!
What does Druckmann mean when he talks about heroes and villains and the thin line separating the two? It's hard to talk intelligently about this stuff without getting into SPOILERS, so consider this the Rubicon. We're about to cross.
You may recall that, in the season 1 finale of The Last of Us, Joel killed a hospital full of people to save Ellie from undergoing surgery that would have killed her. That surgery also would have helped the militaristic Fireflies create a cure to the zombie plague that had brought the world to its knees, since Ellie was the only person known to be immune. But Joel had grown too close to Ellie to allow that; he would rather the plague continue than lose her.
Not everyone agrees with his choice; if the show sticks to the game, Ellie herself will have mixed feelings about it. And Abby definitely isn't a fan. One of the people Joel killed during his massacre was Abby's father, and she sets out on a quest to find Joel in order to exact revenge. To make a long story short, she gets it.
In the game, players take on the role of Ellie as she tries to track down Abby, intent on getting revenge for her revenge. But then, about halfway through, we switch perspectives and play as Abby, seeing what she's up to during the same time. How will all this translate to TV? Will we follow Ellie for the whole of season 2 before switching to Abby in season 3? Or maybe we'll switch back and forth between the characters the whole time? An episode for Ellie and an episode for Abby, perhaps? Or just scene by scene?
Druckmann and Mazin don't give away details, but they sound confident in whatever direction they've gone. “A big part of the theme of the second game is about perspective, how someone's hero could be someone else's villain and vice versa. It's weird to talk about a story where its structure could be a spoiler,” Druckmann said. “I don't even know if it's worth mentioning where we landed because I think that's part of the fun for people familiar with the game to see how we approached that challenge in the show. I will just say that we gave it a lot of thought and tried different things. There are some deviations of where we place things."
Mazin weighed in as well: "We certainly are going to mess around with time the way it was in the source material, but as Neil said, we messed around in ways that we felt were appropriate for the show," he said. "When I say 'messed around,' I mean scientifically determined in a narrative way what we thought would be most impactful."
I know I'm curious to see how Mazin, Druckmann and the rest of their cast and crew handled this. I'll be watching when The Last of Us premieres on HBO and HBO Max in April...probably April 13.
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