‘The Last of Us’ Season 2: Kaitlyn Dever In Talks to Play Abby, HBO Aims at January 2024 Shoot
One of the hottest projects in town right now is the second season of The Last of Us, following the nearly-unimaginable success of the first season. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are adapting the 2020 sequel game into multiple seasons, the first of which is due to start shooting in January.
This is according to ProductionList.com, which lists a January 7, 2024, date for a production start in Vancouver. Seems a bit weird since that’s a Sunday, and Mazin had only completed the script for the first episode before the WGA strike. He’s also on the record saying he’d like to finish all of the scripts before shooting this time around (something he didn’t manage to do for season 1), though pressures from the network, the fact that they really know what they want in the new season, and just the itch of going back to work, may have forced him to change plans. Mazin may not have written anything during the five-month work stoppage, but he certainly continued planning those episodes in his head. That’s just how creative people operate.
But here’s the big bomb. Mazin hinted in an interview with the LA Times that Abby had been cast before the strikes, and we may have finally uncovered her name. Plenty of rumors have circulated online over the summer, but according to Jeff Sneider’s newsletter, it is No One Will Save You star Kaitlyn Dever who is in talks with HBO to take over the role.
What’s most interesting about this is that Dever came very close to playing Ellie in the feature film adaptation Sony was developing a few years ago, having even done a table read for it. Mazin has said that casting Bella Ramsey was a no-brainer ever since they saw her, but they clearly kept Denver’s name on a notepad somewhere.
Abby is one of the two main characters in the second game, next to Ellie. Joel plays a much smaller, albeit impactful role. But the issue of how to adapt The Last of Us Part Two has been one that has driven the Internet insane. Abby plays a major role in the second half, while barely appearing in the first half. Despite that, she has a key part to play at the very beginning of the story.
Will Dever, or whoever ends up getting announced, also have a small part to play in the second season of the HBO series, since they might be implementing the second half of the game in future seasons? Or will they play around with the structure of the game to give Abby a big role in the new season? The structure of the game is as essential to the story as some of the major plot points, so that doesn’t really seem right.
But one thing seems to be clearer than ever: They are not going to play around with the actual story, however structured, much. There’s been a lot of speculation that Abby’s introductory scene, should it happen the same way as the game, may come in the latter half of the season as Mazin could expand those first two hours of gameplay into a lot more episodes. My two cents: there’s no way that’s happening. The story is the story, and they will do a faithful adaptation. I won’t add much else not to spoil it for people who are not familar with it.
The Last of Us season 2 will come out in 2025 on HBO.
Note: A previous version of this article mistakenly assumed Denver had read for Ellie in HBO’s adaptation, as opposed to Sony’s film.
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.
