A lot of The Last of Us fans are excited that the second season of the HBO series is going to introduce Abby, but they also noticed that actress Kaitlyn Dever isn’t specifically buffed up the way Abby is in the games.
Talking to Entertainment Weekly, series creator Neil Druckmann confirms that they didn’t require Dever to bulk up too much for the series as Abby’s physicality was said to be more of a game design aspect. Druckmann explains:
“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.”
In the game, Abby is obviously more built than Ellie, and this is because she’s designed to function more like Joel in the first game. Druckmann continues:
“We would’ve struggled to find someone as good as Kaitlyn to play this role… In the game, you have to play both characters [Ellie and Abby] and we need them to play differently. 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. 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. It’s more about the drama. I’m not saying there’s no action here. It’s just, again, different priorities and how you approach it.”
If anything, the series does have a tendency to change some things from time to time, but it’s mostly been faithful to the main dramatic themes of the source material. Though Dever may not look Abby’s part from the game, she does pose an interesting meta-foil to Bella Ramsey’s Ellie in that Dever was the original fancast to play her before The Last of Us series even happened. No doubt fans are going to be making that subconscious comparison, which is necessary to pull off Ellie and Abby’s narrative connection.
Watch out for The Last of Us Season 2 when it premieres on Max this April.
