This Is Why Ellie’s Actress Isn’t Playing The Last Of Us

The Last Of Us TV show is finally coming for us soon, and with it, the actors are running the press circuit. This early on we already know who has and hasn’t played the games before jumping into the show.

Both Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey have kept their distance from Santa Monica Studio’s equivalent of a video game blockbuster, over almost a decade, between two games and three consoles. Both Game of Thrones actors can defend that they have been busy working on one of the most successful shows of all time, but actually, there’s another pretty good reason to do so.

Bella was told by HBO’s producers to not do that research after confirming that she hadn’t experienced the game firsthand or possibly vicariously by watching someone else stream it yet. She says:

“I did watch some of the gameplay on YouTube just to get a sense of it. But I’m so excited for it to come out – it was such a big part of my life. I shot for a whole year, which is quite a long time when you’ve only lived for 19 years.”

On the other hand, Pedro could have watched the whole game from his nephew playing it. Here’s what he had to say from that experience.

“I watched for as long as I was able to that day, and then I had to leave Florida.

I found Joel so impressive – I found the whole of it such a visually impressive experience. And then I got worried that I would want to imitate too much, which I think could be right in some circumstances, and then a mistake in others.”

The choice to stay away from the source material isn’t necessarily stemming from a disinterest or dislike of it, although it may be understandable while some fans might suspect so.

Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson made the roles of Joel and Ellie across the The Last Of Us video games and DLC. The millions of players who finished the games have become intimately familiar to their voices and acting performances. It’s something that can be a problem for actors when they have to reinterpret the same material.

And so, the question comes up, what would be the point of a The Last Of Us show if HBO was only going to make a categorical frame for frame remake of the video game? It would be like Gus Van Sant’s well intentioned but poorly conceived idea of remaking Psycho, frame by frame, in 1998. For those who don’t remember, what Gus Van Sant created would come to be a commercial and critical flop, that won two Razzies to boot. To some degree, the actors have to be given some distance from the original, so that they can bring something new to the material, in the service of better performances. We can only be hopeful HBO is looking to plumb something new and original our of the material as well.

HBO’s The Last Of Us show will be coming this 2023. The Last Of Us game is playable on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5, and part one of a PlayStation 5 remake is also playable now. The announce trailer for the show released two weeks ago and reaches a combined 20 + million views across Twitter and YouTube.

Source: VideoGamesChronicle