Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie on the upcoming HBO series adaptation of The Last of Us, was encouraged by producers not to play the game. The actress revealed that she didn’t get the opportunity to play the game yet, which is a sentiment shared by her co-star Pedro Pascal who also revealed that he hadn’t played Naughty Dog’s award-winning title.
Speaking to USA Today, Ramsey opened up about doing research on the source material for The Last of Us. “After my first audition, they asked me, ‘have you played it?'” she said in the interview. “And I said ‘nope,’ and they said, ‘keep it that way’.”
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Ramsey added that she did watch some gameplay on YouTube “just to get a sense of it”, stating:
“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. Pedro [Pascal] wrote a little card to me at the end, saying, ‘How interesting that something so huge and life-changing should happen so early in your life and so late in mine.’ I thought it was a really sweet observation and I just had the best time.”
Pascal, on the other hand, limited himself to playing The Last of Us, instead watching his nephew play the game:
“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.”
As for why the actors were seemingly distancing themselves from the game, Pascal explains it best as they didn’t want to simply “imitate” the characters and instead put their own unique spin on them. This is the case for a lot of actors when it comes to adapting video games into movies, as the stars are usually encouraged to bring their own interpretation and performance of the video game characters to another medium.
HBO’s The Last of Us is set to arrive sometime in 2023.
Source: USA Today
