The Last of Us cast importance: they didn't want them to "do impressions" of the video game

After working on an adaptation, it is important to find the actors who are in charge of bringing the characters to life. In a franchise like The Last of Us, the relationship and chemistry that protagonists like Ellie and Joel have is a crucial part of the story. A man with the pain of losing everything, and a young woman with the burden of being the hope of humanity.

After a process that brought many actors and actresses to give life to such emblematic characters, Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal were chosen. Both bring something to their characters and are put to the test in a performance that demands a lot of their acting skills. Neil Druckmann, director of the original game and producer of the series, and Craig Mazin, producer and screenwriter, talk about what both actors managed to bring to the adaptation of The Last of Us.

The significance of casting

From the beginning, Neil and Craig knew how important the choice of cast had to be, as they didn't want them to mimic what was already seen in The Last of Us, plus they knew that just like in the game "if you don’t care for Ellie, the story falls apart."

"Casting these two leads was stressful in a way because we could make a mistake with a different character and survive it," Druckmann comments. But, the same with the game, if you don’t care for Ellie, the story falls apart; it just doesn’t work." It was also important to us that our leads didn't do impressions of Troy Baker’s performance as Joel or Ashley Johnson’s performance as Ellie," Mazin commented. "But we are giving them these characters on paper who are doing a lot of the same things."

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Bella Ramsey as Ellie

The choice of Ellie, as mentioned above, was not an easy task since they were looking for someone who could give a very specific character, in the words of Craig Mazin "the conglomeration of somebody who didn’t exist" and who would also give "the same quality that Ashley Johnson did," however in Bella Ramsey they found someone whose "soul is the same even if the voice and face are different."

"It took a while to cast them because we looked at over 100 auditions from actors from all across the world, and at ages from 10-26," Mazin recounts. "We were asking them to do something that was theoretically impossible because the character of Ellie was the conglomeration of somebody who didn’t exist, a physically drawn character, a 14-year-old girl whose mind and voice were brought to life by Ashley Johnson, who’s a fully-grown woman who was in her 20s at the time. Bella brought this bundle of contradictions to their portrayal of Ellie and it went so much better than I even thought it would. The soul is the same even if the voice and face are different.”

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"Bella had this incredible challenge of giving us the same quality that Ashley Johnson did," Druckmann commented. "And Ashley Johnson set that bar so high that we were watching audition after audition and while they were good, it was when we saw Bella that it felt so natural. It didn’t feel like you were watching an actor. It felt like you were watching Ellie.”

Pedro Pascal as Joel

The role of Joel was a complicated one to cast as well, because it needed someone who could portray a tough person, showing a loss, but at the same time shining on the human side. In the end, Pedro Pascal delivers on this, showing "why his Joel is so compelling and touching and upsetting."

"Everybody’s loss comes in a different way but he certainly carries within him that human experience," Mazin commented. “We had to ask him to become even tougher because 20 years have gone by and he’s closed his heart, gritted his teeth and decided he’s never going to feel anything. It was important to us to show that he would dream. It was something we took from the game and expanded upon. He would dream but we would never see it and he would never know what he was dreaming. Pedro allowed that vulnerability to come through in such a beautiful way, which is why his Joel is so compelling and touching and upsetting."

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“It is interesting because in real life Pedro is such a jokey and light-hearted person, which is so different from Joel," Druckmann comments. "There is so much restraint happening when you watch him act but when those moments of vulnerability come up that’s when we pat ourselves on the back and go, ‘Wow, we cast really well.’"

The Last of Us premieres on HBO MAX on January 15.