Movies based on video games have been a tough nut to crack over the years. While we’ve seen a few success stories on the big screen, game franchises have had equal if not greater success in recent years on the small screen, thanks to shows like Fallout and The Last of Us. In terms of the HBO hit, it was actually going to be a movie before it was a series, and Kaitlyn Dever, who will play Abby in the season about to air on the 2025 TV schedule, was being considered for Ellie.
However, that got shelved, and everyone moved on, but the actress learned some big spoilers about the second game during those early days that shocked me.
Before it became a hit series, The Last of Us was first optioned as a movie, and Kaitlyn Dever was actually attached to play the role of Ellie, the female lead played by Bella Ramsey in the series. She told EW that she toured Naughty Dog Studios sometime in the mid-2010s to meet with studio head Neil Druckmann and talk about the role while the second game was in development. The actress said…
I would literally meet Neil at Naughty Dog and he would walk me around and show me how they created the game. And they were actually making the second game when I was there.
The Last of Us Part II wouldn’t be released until 2020, so Kaitlyn Dever got a very early look at the second game. She didn't even learn the name of Abby, the character that she will play in The Last of Us Season 2. However, she did get to see how Ellie, the character she thought she’d be playing, would age, and she learned details about the plot that she never revealed. Dever continued…
I was seeing the first drawings of older Ellie, and he told me what happens, too. Talk about spoiler alerts... He did ask me, 'Do you want to know what happens?' I was like, 'Yeah, tell me!' So I've been keeping that secret for years.
Details on games like this are often held on to pretty closely, so it says something about the relationship between Dever and Druckmann that he was willing to tell her what happened in the story. Of course, if the movie had happened, and it had been a success, a sequel film based on the second game would have been quite likely, so the studio chief was probably just thinking ahead.
The movie would, like so many others, fall into development hell and never get made. However, Dever’s relationship with Naughty Dog would continue. She would voice the character of Cassie Drake in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, a franchise that would get its own movie, starring Tom Holland.
When The Last of Us was reborn as a series that can be watched with a Max subscription, Kaitlyn Dever wasn’t forgotten. Dever will play Abby, the villain (in a manner of speaking) of the second game. Now she’s finally going to be on screen in the adaptation, just playing somebody very different.
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