As per an interview on SFX magazine, of whichGamesRadartook an excerpt, Craig Mazin, showrunner for the highly anticipatedThe Last of Us HBOshow, had a particularly difficult time finding the right actor to play the universally beloved Ellie. Apparently, the showrunners saw over 100 people before finally coming across Bella Ramsey.
The Last of Us HBO is set to retell the story of the 2013 video game of the same name. ThePlayStationfirst-party title is regarded as having one of the best stories in video games, and that’s in no small part to the stellar performances of co-protagonists, Joel and Ellie, played by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, respectively. Therefore, finding the right actors was an undeniably important task, something Mazin understood well.
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With Joel, the process was surprisingly easy. Pedro Pascal was scouted to play the role and once Mazin saw him, he thought, “there he is, it’s happening already, he’s Joel.” With Ellie, it was much harder, partly because they seemingly attempted to cast an actor that was actually 14. “[Acting] is an easy thing to do terribly,” Mazin explained. “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.”
Mazin further stated that Ellie is meant to be “funny, violent, and tough,” making the casting process that much harder. In the end, they went with Ramsey, who is much older at 19, but, luckily, still rather looks the part. Mazin saw Ramsey’s audition first than Neil Druckmann, theLast of Uscreator who is co-running the show, and was nervous that Druckmann wouldn’t find her as fitting. “But happily, he loved her,” stated Mazin. “And we couldn’t have done better. She’s just the most remarkable performer.”
Mazin even went as far as to call her “the best Ellie ever,” a bold statement given how beloved Johnson’s performance of Ellie is. It’s likely he was particularly referring to a live-action Ellie, or maybe the actors he saw audition, but fans of the game may already be on edge with Mazin due to a comment he made inanother recent interview. Speaking with the New Yorker, he stated that killing human enemies in the show would be perceived differently, because watching a person die was different than “watching pixels die,” a sentiment which many gamers took umbrage with.
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