‘The Last of Us’ creators explain one big Abby change before Season 2 premiere
This post contains spoilers about The Last of Us Part II video game and the Season 2 premiere, “Future Days”
The physical appearance of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) isn’t the only difference between The Last of Us Season 2 and the video game on which the show is based. As The Last of Us co-creator, writer, and director Neil Druckmann explained Monday during a press conference before the Emmy Award-winning show’s Season 2 premiere, the audience’s introduction to Abby was also tweaked.
“In the game, you play as Abby, so you immediately form an empathic connection with her, because you’re surviving as her, you’re running through the snow, you’re fighting infected. And we can withhold certain things and make it a mystery that will be revealed later in the story,” Druckmann said. “We couldn’t do that in the show because you’re not playing as her.”
As Druckmann explained, the solution was to immediately introduce Abby and her connections to Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to the audience.
“Where that revelation happens in the game, if we were to stick to a very similar timeline, viewers would have to wait a very, very long time to get that context,” Druckmann said of the ties that bind the characters together. “It would probably get spoiled to them between seasons, and we didn’t want that, so it felt appropriate for those reasons to move that up and give the viewer that context right off the bat.”
The Last of Us was a sensation for HBO after its release in 2023. Based on the blockbuster game and co-created by Druckmann and Craig Mazin (an Emmy winner for Chernobyl), the show became a ratings smash and Emmy favorite. Season 1 landed 24 nominations overall, with eight wins, including for guest actors Nick Offerman and Storm Reid. Season 2 picks up immediately after the events of the Season 1 finale, which ended in bloody and horrific fashion: After reaching a group of survivors known as the Fireflies who want to use Ellie to find a cure for the cordyceps virus that has left the global population dead or infected, Joel killed several unarmed survivors and medical personnel to save his surrogate daughter, who was all be sure to die in surgery. Abby is one of several new characters who factor heavily into the show as it returns for Season 2, including Dina (Isabel Merced) and Jesse (Young Mazino).
While game players know where the story of Joel and Ellie will go from here, the show’s creative team has been careful to keep the spoilers under wraps. (The embargo for Season 2 reviews is being held until the show premieres on April 13.) Asked on Monday about what scenes the cast and creators were excited to bring to the show from the game, Mazin was careful to avoid spilling any potential beans.
“I don’t want to say what it is, but there was a scene in the final episode of the season … it's quite impactful in the game, but there was this kind of evolution of it as we put it on film that kind of blows me away,” Mazin teased. “Those moments are very exciting.”
Added Ramsey, who hasn’t yet even seen the episodes from Season 2, “Some of the stuff in the last episode, particularly the last two episodes, are some of my favorite, favorite, favorite things to film, and also, I think, to, hopefully, to watch.”
The Last of Us video game debuted in 2013, and it wasn’t long before Sony and director Sam Raimi discussed a film adaptation. While that project never came to fruition, it remains relevant to the current iteration of the franchise: Dever once participated in a table read of the script, where she played Ellie.
“It was a real bonding moment for me and my dad playing the game together, and to have it come back around 10-plus years later felt surreal,” Dever said of her relationship to the franchise and its past. “Because it really kind of felt like, ‘Oh, well, things that are meant to be in your life will happen if they're supposed to.’ And it just felt right. Abby felt right. It was very cool.”
The Last of Us returns on April 13.