- Season two of the show has started on HBO
- Kaitlyn Dever plays new antagonist Abby
- Abby’s inclusion in the second game proved controversial
Warning – spoilers for the video game below
The Last Of Us’ second season kicked off on HBO last night (13 April), marking the introduction to the second game’s primary antagonist Abby.
Kaitlyn Dever has joined the cast and we’ll likely be seeing a lot of her on our screens as the new story unfolds.
Abby is a key part of The Last Of Us: Part II, whose story the new season partly follows. Crucially, she is the daughter of the surgeon who Joel (Pedro Pascal) murdered in season one to prevent Ellie (Bella Ramsey) from being sacrificed. However, fans of the video game didn’t warm to her especially quickly.
So what was the deal?
One key difference in the second video game was a change in the playable characters. In season one, this was Joel and Ellie, in season two, it became Ellie and Abby.
It was a big change considering how much players loved Joel as a character and maybe found it difficult to empathise with Abby. In fact, the actor who voiced and provided a motion-capture performance for the character faced death threats and harassment, which were even directed at her young son.
What’s more, Abby murders Joel early in Part II. It’s an act of revenge for the man who killed not only her father, but the family members of many of her friends. On top of that, she’s also avenging the many more casualties of the Cordyceps infection because he destroyed the hope of a cure.
Read more: The Last of Us season 2 cast explained
“The way into Abby is knowing how grief feels and how loss affects you, especially in the immediate aftermath,” Dever told The Hollywood Reporter of her character’s motivations. “There’s just this shock and this desire to make it all go away.”
This is especially apparent with a line from Abby’s first scene: “Slowly. When we kill him, we kill him slowly.”
“She just needs something to make it all better,” she told the outlet. “And in that moment, the only thing she can think about is revenge. She’s heartbroken, she’s sad, she’s lost and she’s trying to pick up the pieces.”
Abby’s body type controversy
There was also some surprise that Abby had a different body type in the show compared to the game.
The in-game version of Abby was taller, broader and more muscular, deviating from the usual female body types seen in most video games. This was partly to offer a different style of playing experience from the smaller, slighter Ellie.
“In the game, you have to play both characters [Ellie and Abby] and we need them to play differently,” Neil Druckmann, the creator of both games and co-creator of the show, told Entertainment Weekly. “We needed Ellie to feel smaller and kind of maneuver around, and Abby was meant to play more like Joel in that she’s almost like a brute in the way she can physically manhandle certain things.”
Read more: The Last of Us Season 2: Abby’s New Look Explained
There was some surprise, therefore, that Dever was cast. In fact, her own body type meant that there was talk early in the show’s development of her playing Ellie.
.”That doesn’t play as big of a role in this version of the story because there’s not as much violent action moment to moment,” Druckmann said. “We need someone to really capture the essence of those characters…. We don’t value as much, ‘Do they look exactly like the character with their eyebrows or their nose or their body?’ Whatever it is. It’s not nowhere on the priority list, but it’s below a bunch of other things that we consider.”
