We're only a few weeks away from the long-awaited release of The Last of Us HBO series, and audiences are eager to see if it will join the short list of good video game adaptations - or the long list of bad ones. Casting, however, is something fans shouldn't have to worry about, according to one of the showrunners, Craig Mazin. He talked with SFX magazine about the casting process for Ellie, where he watched over 100 auditions:
"Ellie took longer because it’s a harder role to cast... We’re trying to cast a 14-year-old girl and acting is an incredibly difficult thing to do, right? It’s an easy thing to do terribly. It’s a hard thing to do okay. But it’s a really, really hard thing to do brilliantly. And children haven’t had that much life experience. It’s hard to find kids that can embody this... Plus, she needs to be funny, tough, violent and protective of herself. She also needs to make us believe that she’s going to have this connection with Joel, so it took longer. We saw over 100 people."
Mazin recalls that casting Joel was much easier. Pedro Pascal will portray the grizzled apocalypse survivor and reluctant companion to Ellie. "He is Joel," Mazin says as he recalls talking to Pascal. He has big shoes to fill, considering he is taking on the mantle of Joel after Troy Baker, one of the most acclaimed video game actors of all time. The Last of Us videogame was made using motion-capture technology, so Baker not only provided the voice of Joel, but many of his movements and facial expressions as well.
Showrunner Praises Bella Ramsey: "The Most Remarkable Performer"
The long casting process paid off, with Craig Mazin calling Bella Ramsey "the best Ellie ever." His only concern about Ramsey's audition was if his co-showrunner, Neil Druckmann, would like her as much as he did:
"The only fear that I had was because I watched her audition before Neil did, I was panicked that he wouldn’t like it and I would have to live for the rest of my life knowing that we couldn’t have the best Ellie ever... But happily, he loved her. And we couldn’t have done better. She’s just the most remarkable performer."
Bella Ramsey gained recognition for her role as Lyanna Mormont in HBO's Game of Thrones. Lyanna became head of House Mormont at a young age but quickly proved her worth as a hardened politician and brave warrior. This was Ramsey's first acting role, which earned her widespread praise.
Fans of the iconic 2013 videogame of the same name shouldn't have to worry about the show straying too far from the source material. Neil Druckmann, the writer and creative director of the game and its sequel, also serves as showrunner for the HBO series. The only major difference he's made to the show is to cut back on the violence. While he feels the violence was necessary for the player to connect with the game mechanics in the video game, it wasn't needed for a passive medium such as a TV series.
The Last of Us will be released via HBO on January 15th, 2023. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey star in the lead roles, with the supporting cast including Gabriel Luna, Anna Torv, Merle Dandridge, and Nick Offerman.