Without going into spoilers, the upcoming second season of HBO’s “The Last of Us” series adaptation will be based on a good portion of Naughty Dog’s award-winning yet contentious “The Last of Us Part II” game.
With that comes not only the return of Bella Ramsey’s Ellie, Pedro Pascal’s Joel and Gabriel Luna’s Tommy but also several new characters in the story with names like Dina, Jesse, and Lev among others.
Chief amongst these is Abigail ‘Abby’ Anderson – an early twentysomething woman with a rather muscular build due to years of training and combat. Laura Bailey played the role in the game, and it’s a part that’s tricky to pull off on screen.
In a recent interview with THR, showrunner Craig Mazin spoke about casting that role and when asked if he had found his Abby he said: “Maybe” before laughing. The interviewer then said: “You’re turning red, so that’s making me think ‘Yes'” to which Mazin responds:
“The strike stopped us in our tracks. Things were in process. Look, Abby was the first role that we wanted to tackle. We’ve got a pretty good track record of making major cast announcements and people going, ‘Really?’ which will probably continue. So people may disagree, but I think we got it right so far and the audience seems to feel we got it right and the Academy seems to feel we got it right.”
The first season originally ran for ten episodes before being rolled back to nine. Asked if the second season will go the full ten, he says:
“We’ve laid out our vision to HBO for how this series should lay out across not one season, but multiple seasons….
You never know. It can end up being three or five [seasons]. But four seems like a good number. Some seasons, because of the story we’re telling, will need fewer episodes and some will need more…
I don’t know if any season will actually have the same amount of episodes. But, whatever, the number’s not important. What’s important is when they get to the end of the season, they’re like, ‘That was a good season’.”
Production on the second season was originally aiming to get going this Fall but has likely been pushed back to early 2024 due to the strikes. Filming on the new season is expected to take place primarily in Vancouver.
