Despite The Last Of Us finishing its adaptation’s first season a little while back, fans still talk about everything the series did. The adaptation was easily the most faithful video game adaptation ever put on the big screen. They portrayed the characters accurately, and straight-up recreated numerous scenes from the first game and had similar dialogue throughout the nine-episode season. Just as important, when they changed things, they made sure it didn’t betray the lore and expanded it meaningfully. But what many fans adored was seeing multiple actors from the game cast in the first season.
That included Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, who portrayed Joel and Ellie in both of Naughty Dog’s titles. On the PlayStation Blog, the two actors talked about the “surreal” experience they felt doing the voices and being different characters in the live-action show. For Troy Baker, he was happy not to have a “simple cameo,” but he admitted there was a challenge in that:
“Giving me a role that had some meat on it, pardon the pun, as opposed to just being a wink to the camera, was fun, it was a challenge. To see these scenes and sets that were originally, literally a gray wooden box on gray carpet, with 64 cameras around us, on a soundstage, to now, built from the ground up, with meticulous detail,” Baker continued. “If I could have gone back to the person that was walking into the production office [for the original The Last of Us] and said, ‘Dude, you’re not going to believe this, but more than 10 years from now, let me tell you what this thing looks like.’”
Neil Druckmann was there too and admitted that it was their only pick when they cast Ashley Johnson as Anna for the live-action series. They knew she had to be Anna because she was Ellie in the game.
Johnson was happy to talk about how much The Last of Us meant to all of them and the pressure to do right by the show:
“[This franchise] is something that we care so much about, and there’s that feeling that I don’t want to let anybody down,” Johnson said. “More people are going to see this, people that know nothing about the game. I want those people to be as connected to it as some of the people were to the game, connected to these characters and connected to the story, and believe in these people.
They did, and many already consider the first season an Emmy favorite. Now we just have to wait for Season 2 to come along.
