‘The Last of Us’ Season 2: Craig Mazin Teases Abby Has Been Cast
The writers strike halted development on the second season of The Last of Us, and all we’ve had for the past few months to deal with the long wait have been some cryptic messages from co-creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, made before the stoppage, about the second game being adapted into more than one season (though not necessarily two). Not much has changed, though, but in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Mazin gave the strongest hint yet that one of the fundamental pieces of casting of the second season may already be locked.
We’re talking about Abby, of course. To try to respect the strict spoiler policy that should come with anything surrounding The Last of Us, we’ll refrain from sharing any details about who Abby is and why she is important to the story of the second game — if you’ve played the game, you know all too well who she is.
In this interview, which was conducted after the actors’ strike was announced (and which allegedly followed the rules of the WGA strike), Mazin was asked point-blank if they’ve found their Abby, to which he replied “Maybe”, later adding:
“The strike stopped us in our tracks. Things were in process. Look, Abby was the first role that we wanted to tackle. We’ve got a pretty good track record of making major cast announcements and people going, ‘Really?’ which will probably continue. So people may disagree, but I think we got it right so far and the audience seems to feel we got it right and the Academy seems to feel we got it right.”
He’s referring, of course, to the social media pushback that the showrunners received after the announcement that Bella Ramsey would be playing Ellie — a loud minority that we never heard from again after the series started airing on HBO. But of course, the second video game of The Last of Us is quite familiar with controversies and online backlash, so if that happens when the announcement of Abby’s actress is made, it will probably be just the first of many to come.
Mazin also talked about this topic, saying:
“Anybody that has played the game and then watched the first season knows that sometimes we do exactly what happened to the game and sometimes we do something wildly different. We also don’t necessarily do things in the same order, or at the same time. In our first season, we repeatedly did things that were upsetting — everyone died except Joel and Ellie. People understood watching the show that this was a story where people aren’t safe.
If you are planning on running a series for as long as it can, you put plot armor on your main characters until such time the actors are asking for too much money or their Q score goes down or the ratings go down, and then you kill them. That’s not what we do or what HBO does. So anyone can die at any moment, as far as I’m concerned.
As for backlash, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between emotion because they care and backlash. But neither I nor Neil make things with that in mind. There are also times during the season where we think they’re probably gonna be annoyed with us, but later they’ll get it.”
Mazin and Druckmann have said before that we should expect more than one season to come from the second video game, but haven’t yet announced how many. There are a few reasons for this — first, it’s possible that they themselves haven’t made up their mind; they could also be afraid that the second season will see a decline in numbers, and HBO decides to wrap things up with just one more season (most unlikely, though).
However, there’s a theory I’ve been mulling for a while. It’s essentially Naughty Dog’s worst-kept secret now that The Last of Us Part III is coming, and while Druckmann has said before they will not be creating new seasons of TV from scratch, it’s possible that they might adapt the third video game as well, especially since the third season will arrive on HBO by 2026 at the very earliest. Mazin said the following about the potential number of seasons:
“It can end up being three or five. But four seems like a good number. Some seasons, because of the story we’re telling, will need fewer episodes and some will need more. The best news is the audience wants more. We will not indulge a desire for more simply to make them happier when they hear how many episodes are announced. And if they don’t like how many episodes are in a season because they want more, well, OK.
But when all is said and done, I think the wisdom of how we lay it out will hopefully be clear. I don’t know if any season will actually have the same amount of episodes. But, whatever, the number’s not important. What’s important is when they get to the end of the season, they’re like, ‘That was a good season.'”
Bella Ramsey revealed earlier this year that the original plan was for season 2 to start filming in late 2023. With the strike potentially coming to an end soon, Mazin will likely get back to writing and perhaps we will be able to get the second season in 2025 after all.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
