21 Things You Might Not Know About ‘The Last of Us’

Video game adaptations have had a rocky road, but HBO’s The Last of Us, released in 2023, surpassed even some of the best. Originally a PlayStation game released in 2013, The Last of Us tells the story of teenage Ellie and smuggler Joel reluctantly teaming up as they encounter obstacles amid an infection that has killed most of humanity. Season 1 earned 24 Emmy nominations and 30 million average viewers per episode. Season 2 is currently airing on Sunday nights; here’s what you need to know about the show to tide you over as you wait for the next episode.

Warning: Spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 below!

1. The Last of Us was almost a movie rather than a TV show.
2. Bella Ramsey’s audition tape was undeniable.
3. Matthew McConaughey could have been Joel.
4. Real fungi and wildlife inspire the infected’s prosthetics.
5. Ramsey and Pascal were told to avoid the game—but they didn’t really listen.
6. The pilot was originally supposed to be two separate episodes.
7. The show contains a couple of references to the video game developer Naughty Dog.
8. Nick Offerman added dialogue from his character’s description in the script.
9. “Long, Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt experienced a 4900 percent increase in streams within an hour of Episode 3 airing.
10. Many actors from the game also appear in the show.
11. Finding an actor to play Sam was so difficult that Craig Mazin turned to Twitter for auditions.
12. The scene with the hive of infected in “Endure and Survive” took a month to shoot.
13. The set was often freezing cold.
14. “Left Behind” was shot in a real abandoned mall, but the entire top floor was VFX.
15. That was a real giraffe in the Season 1 finale.
16. Season 2 follows the events of The Last of Us Part II video game.
17. Catherine O’Hara’s character is not in the games.
18. Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Abby in Season 2, was almost cast as Ellie.
19. We will see different types of infected.
20. The game’s perspective shifts are being considered.
21. There will be a Season 3—and maybe more.

The Last of Us was almost a movie rather than a TV show.

The Last of Us video game was an immediate hit, selling 1.3 million copies within its first three days of release, so it’s no surprise that an adaptation was announced the very next year: Production studio Screen Gems revealed plans for a film version directed by Sam Raimi of The Evil Dead and Spider-Man fame. A script was written—it got a table-read in 2015—and casting was discussed: Maisie Williams was one of the front-runners for the role of Ellie.

By 2016, the film project came up against delays that would eventually kill it altogether. The video game’s co-creator and writer Neil Druckmann has explained that he preferred a movie version with a No Country for Old Men vibe, while the studio pushed for something more like World War Z. He eventually had lunch with Craig Mazin, who created and wrote HBO’s Chernobyl and was intrigued by Mazin’s vision for a TV show. In March 2020, HBO announced The Last of Us series, produced by the two men.

Bella Ramsey’s audition tape was undeniable.

Mazin and Druckmann thought they would struggle to find someone who could match what the original actor Ashley Johnson did with the character of Ellie: They needed someone “funny and quirky” who could also be “violent and rough,” as Druckmann put it. Thankfully, Bella Ramsey, who had their breakout role in Game of Thrones, submitted an audition tape. “Choosing Ellie was the scariest part of this, I think, until we saw Bella’s audition,” Mazin said. They felt like Ramsey already was already Ellie. “I didn’t see Bella acting like Ellie,” Druckmann said. “I saw Ellie.”

Matthew McConaughey could have been Joel.

In 2023, Mazin confirmed on a podcast that he met with Matthew McConaughey to discuss the role of Joel, as rumors had suggested, but said that the conversation was very early in the process: “I can’t say that it was serious, it was more of just like, ‘Hey, here’s something we can talk about.’ ” According to Mazin, Pedro Pascal was always on their list to play Joel, but they were told he was unavailable. While they struggled with their search, they received a call from Pascal’s agent, who said he might be available after all. Mazin sent scripts to Pascal and got a call saying he loved them the next morning. Pascal confirmed that “What drew me to the show was the first three scripts.”

Real fungi and wildlife inspire the infected’s prosthetics.

Nailing the appearance of the infected was critical. Fans of the video game knew exactly what they wanted to see, and newcomers to the world needed to have an immediate “oh my god” reaction. This is why, according to Mazin, “Before we ever rolled any film, we gathered together a small army of people to work on how to get the clickers [the third stage of infection] right.”

In The Last of Us, the pandemic is caused by Cordyceps fungus, so the character designers had real-world examples to reference. Barrie Gower, the show’s prosthetics designer, also asked Neil Druckmann about his favorite art from the video game. Between those images and plenty of research on real fungi, the visual effects team started creating their version of the infected. In all, they spent up to four months developing their designs. They were especially inspired by leaf miner shapes, which appear on leaves after insects burrow through them, and shelf mushrooms, which grow in shelflike patterns. For the clickers, the team referenced the brightly-colored petals of chicken of the woods fungi. 

Ramsey and Pascal were told to avoid the game—but they didn’t really listen.

With such extensive source material, it makes sense that the actors might want to dive in and learn all they can, but Druckmann and Mazin didn’t want that. According to Ramsey, “We were advised, encouraged, and ordered to stay away from it. We disobeyed those orders.” Ramsey primarily watched clips on YouTube to get a feel for Ellie. Pascal gave the game a shot but was not great at it—he joked that his nephews got so frustrated with his inability to stay alive that they stepped in and took the console away.

The pilot was originally supposed to be two separate episodes.

The first episode of Season 1, “When You're Lost in the Darkness,” was a lengthy 1 hour and 21 minutes—because it was originally two episodes that got combined into one. Despite that big change, the showrunners were happy with the finished product overall, though Mazin has said, “I do wish we had the foresight to know the original first two episodes were going to become one long episode. Some things got a little bit kludgy or lost on the cutting room floor that I wish hadn’t been. Still, first episodes notoriously go wonky, and ours didn’t really.” As for whether fans will ever get to see what got cut, unfortunately, Mazin’s answer is probably not. 

The show contains a couple of references to the video game developer Naughty Dog.

The Last of Us show contains many references to the video game that a non-gamer wouldn’t pick up on, both big and small. Some characters’ clothes are identical to clothes from the game; there are musical parallels, and even posters in the backgrounds echo things found in the games. But the meta-ness is brought to the next level with some props that allude to Naughty Dog, the video game developer that made The Last of Us. In Episode 7, “Left Behind,” Ellie meets with Captain Kwong to talk about her future. Kwong’s keys are shown, which have a keychain with the Naughty Dog logo on it. In Season 1, Episode 2, “Infected,” Tess has a lighter that’s a replica of one that appears in a totally different Naughty Dog game, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

Nick Offerman added dialogue from his character’s description in the script.

In the critically acclaimed third episode, “Long, Long Time,” Nick Offerman plays Bill, a survivalist who is ready with his bunker when the pandemic hits. In the original script, there was a description of what Bill might be thinking as the military comes through his town to remove its residents. The script imagined his inner dialogue as, “Not today, you new world order jack-booted f***s.” Offerman went to Mazin and said, “That’s a great line; we should probably keep that in the show,” and it became dialogue. 

“Long, Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt experienced a 4900 percent increase in streams within an hour of Episode 3 airing.

“Long, Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt, originally recorded in 1970, comes up twice in Episode 3, which is named after the song. First, Bill and his eventual husband Frank bond as they play it on the piano, and then the actual track plays at the end of the episode. To find the right song, Mazin reached out to musician and composer Seth Rudetsky. Mazin was looking for a show tune that would fit in the episode. He wanted something like “I Miss the Music” from the show Curtains (2006), but he wanted something from an older era. Initially, Rudetsky suggested “Her Face” from Carnival! But once he learned more about the context, he realized a song with the pronoun her wasn’t ideal. That’s when he suggested his “favorite devastating song,” though not from a musical: “Long, Long Time.” Sudetsky got a “source music consultant” credit in the episode, and he earned that special credit: The song left such an impression on viewers that it had a 4900 percent increase in Spotify streams within an hour. 

Many actors from the game also appear in the show.

Fans of the video game saw plenty of familiar faces in Season 1. Merle Dandridge reprised her role as Marlene, the leader of the Fireflies. Ashley Johnson, the original Ellie, played Ellie’s mother Anna, in the Season 1 finale, “Look for the Light.”

“There was a special level of it for me to play the mother of this character that I care so deeply about,” Johnson said. In a smaller cameo, Laura Bailey also appeared in the finale as a nurse in the operating room with Ellie. Bailey plays the larger role of Abby in The Last of Us Part II game, but this role was somewhat of a reprisal because she also voiced an operating room nurse in the original game.

Jeffrey Pierce, Joel’s brother Tommy in the game, had a two-episode arc as Perry, resistance leader Kathleen’s (Melanie Lynskey) right-hand man. Troy Baker, the original Joel, played a new character, James, who was written for the show. James is a member of a group of cannibalistic survivors led by David, whom Ellie encounters.

In an interview discussing the role, Baker joked that he thought he’d be offered the part of a clicker, so James exceeded expectations. But on that note, clicker voice actors in the game, Misty Lee and Phillip Kovats, did appear as clickers in the second episode, “Infected.” Season 2 promises more echoes of the game’s actors as Jeffrey Wright will reprise his role of militia group leader Isaac. 

Finding an actor to play Sam was so difficult that Craig Mazin turned to Twitter for auditions.

In the game, Ellie and Joel encounter brothers Henry and Sam while they’re hiding out from hunters. Mazin suggested that the show’s version of Sam be deaf; Druckmann agreed, joking that the choice was so good he was mad he didn’t think of it initially. However, they struggled to find the right actor for the role. They needed a young boy who was Black, deaf, and fluent in ASL. Mazin even tweeted about the search, but they still only received around 10 auditions. Luckily, they discovered Keivonn Woodard, who had never acted before. He ended up receiving an Emmy nomination for guest actor in a drama series, the youngest ever to do so at just 10 years old.

The scene with the hive of infected in “Endure and Survive” took a month to shoot.

In the fifth episode, “Endure and Survive,” Kathleen and her crew pursue Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam; they all end up in a suburban cul-de-sac, where a truck drops into a sinkhole, letting loose a barrage of infected. Production designer John Paino worked with his team to create the entire set from scratch so that it had all the elements needed to bring the terrifying experience to life. According to Paino, it was rare for the show to use storyboards, but they were required to coordinate all the action and practical effects. It took four weeks of night shoots to finish the scene. Lamar Johnson, the actor who played Henry, said they often wouldn’t wrap filming until around five or six in the morning.

The set was often freezing cold.

Season 1 was filmed over the course of about a year in Alberta, Canada, an isolating experience that Pascal said brought him and Ramsey closer together. They also experienced the cold conditions Canada has to offer. Episode 6, “Kin,” takes place in many outdoor locations made to look like Jackson, Wyoming.

According to the episode’s director, Jasmila Žbanić, they filmed episodes in temperatures as cold as -15°C, or 5°F. In the episode where Ellie meets David and James, the actors were filming outdoors at -17°C, which is just over 1°F. The conditions were so freezing, and the actors were doing takes up to eight minutes long, to the point that Ramsey said their voice changed from how it normally sounds. “It's so hard to speak normally when it's that cold,” they told GQ. “[L]ike your mouth just doesn’t work.”

“Left Behind” was shot in a real abandoned mall, but the entire top floor was VFX.

“Left Behind,” the seventh episode of the first season, reveals some critical pieces of Ellie’s backstory. The episode’s narrative comes from extra DLC, or downloadable content, for The Last of Us video game, and it was essential to Mazin to recreate the mall from that DLC. They had access to a mall in Calgary, which the crew was allowed to change in any way they wanted because it was scheduled for demolition.

But it was primarily a one-story mall, unlike the one they were trying to recreate. So, the team painted a blue line along the top of the interior to mark that anything above that point would be rendered with visual effects. For the shot in which Ellie and her love interest Riley watch the entire mall light up, they filmed in front of a blue screen on a soundstage. All the effects were added later, which added up to plenty of time and money. But as Mazin justified in an episode of The Last of Us Podcast, “Is it worth it for this one marquee shot where this world comes to life? Yes.”

That was a real giraffe in the Season 1 finale.

In the Season 1 finale, Ellie and Joel encounter giraffes in Salt Lake City, which allows Ellie a moment of lightness after a traumatic experience. The Calgary Zoo lent the production a bull Masai giraffe named Nabo to film the scene. Some VFX were still needed in post-production, so it was shot in an enclosure with green screens around it. Trainers worked to ensure the giraffe would be comfortable eating out of the actors’ hands. Ramsey later said, “It’s like a spiritual experience, almost, being so close to such a magnificent animal.” 

Season 2 follows the events of The Last of Us Part II video game.

In the sSeason 2 premiere, time has jumped forward five years after the first season. Joel and Ellie are living in Jackson, Wyoming, and still grappling with the events of Season 1. Season 2 will have seven episodes—two fewer than the previous season.

Catherine O’Hara’s character is not in the games.

When Schitt’s Creek star Catherine O’Hara’s casting was announced in February 2024, her role was described as “secret” and “undisclosed.” Now that Episode 1 has been released, we know that O’Hara plays the role of Gail, a therapist who works in Jackson. In her first scene, she reveals that Joel killed her husband Eugene, a character that players of The Last of Us Part II will know. He doesn’t appear in the video game—other characters merely reference him—but we will see him in the show: It has been announced that Joe Pantoliano will play Eugene.

Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Abby in Season 2, was almost cast as Ellie.

When a movie adaptation of The Last of Us, directed by Sam Raimi, was in the works, Kaitlyn Dever was being considered for the role of Ellie. Druckmann wanted her to play the part and even gave her a tour of Naughty Dog as the company was working on the second part of the game. He also let her in on some secret Part II plot details.

Though the movie wasn’t made, Druckmann did ask Dever to appear in one of Naughty Dog’s video games, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (she’s one of the characters in the epilogue). When they were casting the eventual TV show, Dever had outgrown the role of Ellie—but while searching for an actor to play Abby, a Firefly from Salt Lake City in Season 2, Druckmann and Mazin went back to Dever for the role.

We will see different types of infected.

Players of The Last of Us video game are familiar with many different types of infected: There are “clickers,” “runners, “bloaters,” and “shamblers,” to name a few. Season 2 has already shown us an encounter with a “stalker”; these infected are named for their proclivity to stalk their prey. But Mazin has teased the possibility of new variations on the infected in Season 2. “What we wanted was to show a kind of evolution,” he said in a featurette about Season 2. “Not just in how our characters dealt with the infected, but the infected themselves.”

 “How do we escalate? How do we show that this Cordyceps outbreak is not static?” Druckmann said. “It’s evolving over time.”

The infected also got an updated look to reflect Season 2’s cold weather. “Our first sit down conversations with Neil and Craig were about changing the look of some of the characters, such as the infected,” Gower said in a featurette following Episode 2, “so we could portray then in a very cold, frostbitten way.”

The game’s perspective shifts are being considered.

The video game uses perspective shifts to tell the story of Part II: Players experience half of the game as Ellie and half as Abby, giving them empathy for both characters. TV viewers won’t get to experience the impact those shifts have on a player of the game. “Neil said something that was so interesting to me … that I didn’t really think about much as a player, I just experienced it,” Mazin said on The Last of Us Podcast, “which is that when you’re playing somebody, and you then shift over and play somebody else, they need to have … different physicality, different ways to attack … So when you’re Joel, you feel one way. When you’re Ellie, you feel different. And you play differently, you’re just more scared because you’re smaller.” Still, according to Mazin, the idea behind these perspective shifts won’t be lost in Season 2.

The showrunners have also noted that TV opened the door to Dever’s casting. In the game, Abby is notably larger than Ellie, but that character design was important in making the perspective shifts feel even more significant. Highlighting those differences is less critical in a medium like TV that isn’t as reliant on a first-person perspective. “We don’t have gameplay,” Mazin said, “so to me, the key was to find a certain ferocity and relentlessness, and I think you’ll see some of that as the season goes on, and certainly as we go forward with the show.” 

There will be a Season 3—and maybe more.

Mazin and Druckmann have said that the show will not continue past the narrative the video games tell, which ends with Part II—but Mazin has also made it clear that The Last of Us Part II is not a one-season story. In April 2025, HBO announced that the show was renewed for a third season. Beyond that, nothing is confirmed, but Mazin believes that “the story may require Season 4.”

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