That The Last of Us has been such a resounding success must be something of a conundrum for a certain section of the franchise's fanbase — great that it's great, but you'd think the most toxic cohort would've happily seen it doomed to failure. We're referring, of course, to the early backlash towards HBO's casting process for their big-budget adaptation, with their lengthy search for Joel and Ellie derided by a sliver of naysayers as soon as Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey were announced.
Ramsey arguably took the bulk of the flack, perhaps made worse by the fact her character is one of the better written in the video game universe. Ellie is a fan-favourite: stern but fragile, psychologically complex, the product of all the vulnerabilities of a teenage girl and a survival instinct inevitably incubated amid the social decay of the post-apocalypse. Fears as to whether Ramsey, then best known for a small, endearing part in Game of Thrones, could shoulder such emotional weight might've been legitimate.
But that wasn't where concern apparently laid. No, this was an aesthetic issue. Unlike Elliot Page or Kaitlyn Dever, then some of the fan-favourite casting picks for the role, Ramsey doesn't look like Ellie in the video game. Cue a torrent of vitriol following the announcement of their casting, this then 17-year-old chastised online viciously and endlessly for the particulars of their appearance. The backlash picked up anew after the first preview for the show dropped in August last year, certain sections of the fanbase once again picking on Ramsey for their, well, facial features.
“It's the first time I've ever had a negative reaction to something,” Ramsey told the New York Times. She describes scrolling through endless reams of acidic spite, that there'd “times where [they'd] find it funny […] then I'd get to the end of a 10-minute scrolling session, put my phone down and realise: maybe that was a bad idea.”
Then, of course, the first episode of The Last of Us came out, an 85-minute introduction to the world before-and-after it was struck by the cataclysmic pandemic of a fungal virus that turns its victims into mushroom-stuffed marionettes. Ramsey's Ellie appears halfway through that episode, chained to a wall under weeks-long observation, her captors waiting for the bite on her arm to ravage her body and turn her into another freak. Cornered like an injured fawn, she kicks away the trays of food they bring her, flips the bird and roars obscenities; she's bitingly funny, acerbic, masking a deeper sadness. It's Ramsey. It's Ellie.
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That strength of performance continues through to the second episode, “Infected,” wherein Joel, Ellie and Tess (Anna Torv) traverse the ruins of Boston to meet with a team of Fireflies at the Massachusetts State House. Funnily enough, her appearance doesn't come to mind so much as the essence of Ellie that Ramsey so deftly captures — there's that protective wit, waved around like a flipblade, but also the wide-eyed curiosity of a young woman never afforded the privilege of childhood. More to the point, Ramsey isn't just a reproduction of Ellie: she nestles perfectly in the space between impersonation and interpretation, the familiar and the novel, as any great existing character performance should.
If the broad critical acclaim for The Last of Us wasn't already so rewarding, a consensus rightly growing that this could already be the best show of the year, how all the more delicious it is to see Ramsey's detractors proven head-in-hands wrong.
