“There’s No Reason For People Not To Know”: Bella Ramsey Opens Up About Their Liberating Autism Diagnosis & The Epic New Season Of ‘The Last Of Us’

In a sturdy, redbrick barn in rural Leicestershire, Bella Ramsey considers a 10-foot drop from the top of a hay bale. It’s an icy, mid-winter morning and the lead of the zombie mega-hit The Last of Us has requested we meet at a family-run farm near to where they grew up, where members of the public can enjoy tractor rides and feed the animals (of which there are plenty, including an ornery-looking goat that Ramsey claims to have visited since they were a child).

The mood is immediately frolicsome. “I’m going to drop down,” they holler at me with that slight flick of a lisp you’ll recognise off the telly. At this, they leap from the bale, wrapping their legs around a rope swing. I’m momentarily gripped by visions of HBO executives screaming in fear as the principal actor on their reportedly $100 million-a-series post-apocalyptic thriller breaks an ankle. Luckily, they stick the landing gracefully. “Fun!” they enthuse breathlessly, happily brushing some errant hay off their faded black Adidas sweatshirt.

Granted, a muddy farmyard in the Midlands is not the most celeb-y setting for a sit-down with Vogue, but it just so happens that this is one of Ramsey’s favourite places. It certainly fits their vibe. The Ramsey family is a tight unit: dinners at home, family viewings of The Chase – Bella recently entered a pub quiz with their parents and received a wooden spoon for coming in last.

We’d met earlier in the car park of the local train station – I spotted Ramsey waving wildly at me, dressed in standard-issue black puffer and white Adidas trainers, looking to the untrained eye like every other British youth on a grey day. “Look for the tiny red car,” they’d instructed me on text. The car is indeed red and tiny, and when I squeezed in they cheerfully announced that they failed their driving test four times. “This,” they say drolly after accidentally drifting into the wrong lane, “is the roundabout I failed on.”

Although don’t be entirely fooled. For all their approachability – they just offered me a pair of wellies – Ramsey ranks high among the most successful actors of their generation. In 2023, almost 40 million people watched their first appearance in The Last of Us and it has since become HBO’s most-viewed show ever in Europe. In the public eye for just under half their life, their ascent from British child actor to Hollywood name came courtesy of another streaming juggernaut, Game of Thrones, in which they starred, age 11, as flinty-eyed noblewoman Lyanna Mormont. Yet apart from a querulous child in bottle glasses who asks if Ramsey is Mildred from CBBC’s The Worst Witch (they were and, yes, they’re happy to take a photo), the farm is still somewhere they can go largely unrecognised. The bored petting zoo attendant who hands over a white rabbit to Ramsey certainly doesn’t clock them from their front row appearances at Dior. Ramsey likes it for this reason. “Hey, little guy,” they whisper as they stroke the quivering bunny.

In many ways, Ramsey is an archetype of their generation: empathetic, prone to abstemiousness. They’ve never been drunk (“I’ll have, like, half a pint of beer or Guinness”) and have only ever been to a club once (“I was like, ‘Oh, this is a great experience, but I don’t immediately need to do it again’”). They worry about climate change – “We’ve been above the 1.5 degree limit basically all last year” – and prefers to source their clothes secondhand for environmental reasons. They get a little too obsessed with Love Island (series eight’s Tasha and Andrew were their favourites, FYI).

One could argue they also present a new kind of hope. On a planet that feels increasingly hostile towards queer people, here is a nonbinary person who, despite the rightward drift of politics, has millions in their thrall, including a devoted online following and the influence that comes with playing the lead in one of the biggest television hits in history. And they understand they have a voice too, even over a warming plate of beans on toast in the farmyard cafe. “It’s the golden age of America!” they splutter, sarcastically, of Donald Trump’s election. “Like, really?” they mutter, more angrily. “It’s terrifying, actually – how is he in power?”

Next month, The Last of Us – its post-apocalyptic setting freshly relevant – will return for its second series. Based on a legendary video game, it combines gruesome violence and horror jump scares with a mind-spinning level of nuance and tender character work. Ramsey is reprising their role as Ellie, the sullen American teenager who is immune to the cordyceps fungus turning everyone else into zombies and who may, therefore, hold the key to humanity’s rescue. Five years on, Ellie has settled in a seemingly bucolic commune in Jackson, Wyoming, although a world-shattering lie about her past is about to catch up with her. Emmy nominated for the role the first time out, Ramsey is genius in it, the perfect amounts of precocious, sarcastic and wide-eyedly vulnerable.

“Bella is a soul partner at work and in life,” their co-lead Pedro Pascal confirms. Thrown together by tragedy, over the course of the first season his character, Joel, went from a hired gun shepherding Ellie to a lab that promises it can extract her fungi-resistant DNA to becoming her stand-in father figure. This season, however, will test that relationship to its extremes. “[They’re] the most empathetic actor I’ve worked with,” he tells me. “You have to be careful to not forget, at least then, that they are navigating an early chapter of work and of life, because you instantly feel under their care and understanding.”

Over the course of the job the pair became BFFs, proving a viral sensation on the first season’s press tour – a kind of two-person Generation Game, with Pascal crowned the internet’s daddy and Ramsey a younger, cheekier upstart. Today, Pascal is saved in Ramsey’s phone as Pedge (“I hate calling him Pedro. It feels so formal”). They even give each other fashion advice. Fabio Immediato, Ramsey’s stylist, has dressed them in Prada and Valentino menswear, adapted to their 5ft 1½in frame. That Thom Browne skirted tuxedo they wore to last year’s Met Gala, lined with a jaw-dropping array of pearls and pinstripes… that was custom too.

Ramsey is partial to crisp, masculine tailoring with unexpected twists – an electric-blue watch to liven up a dark suit here, a flash of white winged eyeliner there – and always in a way that bucks the ultra-preened look of their co-stars. At a Time100 Next gala, they paired a Prada short suit with unshaved legs, and their hair is often slicked back in a severe centre part, even for the bougiest of events. Femme, masc – Ramsey’s approach to style shrugs and says: “Who cares? This is what I feel comfortable in.”

“Loyal,” Immediato says instantly when I ask him how he would describe Ramsey. He has a studio below the Hollywood Hills and was evacuated just as wildfires ripped through Los Angeles in January. Ramsey kept calling and texting to check in. “They wanted to see how I was,” he says, still touched. “It makes me love them even more.”

Lena Dunham, who directed Ramsey in the 2022 medieval drama Catherine Called Birdy, says: “Bella reminds me of Tilda Swinton in Orlando. [They have] that ability to shapeshift and become new in front of your very eyes. They have a quality that is both modern and totally timeless,” she tells me. “They’d fit as easily at a rave in Dalston as in a Renaissance court.”

For their part, Ramsey says they’re a lot quieter than their Last of Us alter ego (Ellie’s favourite word is “motherfucker”; Bella is prone to saying “frickin’”). Ramsey was born into a family with “no acting history” proper, although their parents are am-dram enthusiasts and met through music (their father works in business but is a keen trumpet player on the side). They still remember their dad blasting Tears for Fears and Blondie in the car off a “little iPod – one of the ones that doesn’t have a touchscreen” growing up. When they were three, Ramsey joined their older sister’s amateur drama group – “too young, it’s supposed to be four!” The highlight of the siblings’ theatrics was playing the cow in Jack and the Beanstalk when they were eight, with Ramsey as the back-half. At the climactic moment, they would split apart and run up the aisles of the theatre. “Eight was definitely my favourite year – that’s when I peaked,” they deadpan. “It’s all been downhill since then.”

At age 10 they got into Television Workshop, the Nottingham-based acting group that specialises in unearthing young talent outside of the London bubble. Samantha Morton, Felicity Jones and Vicky McClure have all progressed through its ranks. Their mum would ferry a young Ramsey back and forth between auditions and shoots, cranking Matilda the Musical at maximum volume in the car.

Television Workshop director Alison Rashley first met Ramsey half a decade ago: “They act from their gut,” she tells me. “The performance is always absolutely honest. There are no tricks, just utter commitment to a role.” They’re still in touch: Ramsey flew in from Canada last week to play a five-a-side football tournament to raise money for the organisation. “It was a freezing cold Sunday morning, but they were there,” she says. “That’s the real Bella.”

After their breakout role in Game of Thrones, Ramsey played the aforementioned Mildred in the CBBC’s The Worst Witch adaptation, but left at the end of the third series, finding the pressure too much. “I was the lead and I had to show up every day, and was taking care of all the other cast members,” they recall. “I was in this role of responsibility at age 12.” It was an enormous weight on their pre-teen shoulders and they turned inward from the stress. When their parents FaceTimed them during shooting, they barely recognised their silent, closed-off child.

After the first series wrapped, Ramsey developed anorexia “for a couple of years. I had this real need to, I think, show people in a physical way that I was struggling, because I found it so hard to vocalise,” Ramsey explains. While seeking treatment, their counsellor told them to visualise their ED as an “external part” of themselves. “It can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it’s not a friend,” Ramsey was told. They are remarkably clear-eyed about the subject now, describing how their anorexia – now long in the rear-view mirror – felt like a “worst enemy disguised as a best friend”.

It’s the subject of their first ever script, a feature they’ve written and are hoping to direct called Toast and Jam, after the one thing that “helped me get over my eating disorder”. Every night, they would have some bread with jam – it became a regular habit that exorcised the guilt they felt over eating: “It was a routine and that felt good to me.”

On the subject of routines, Ramsey is a big fan. “I’ve spoken a bit about neurodivergence before, but I always for some reason didn’t want to…” they trail off. “I felt like I didn’t want to say what it was… Shoot.” They gather their wits and finally declare: “I got diagnosed with autism when I was filming season one of The Last of Us.”

While shooting in Canada, a crew member with an autistic daughter assumed that Ramsey had it too, setting them off on a journey that ended in a formal psychiatric assessment and diagnosis. It confirmed something that Ramsey had “always wondered” about. As a child, they’d routinely felt out of place in school – a self-described “weirdo” and “loner” more comfortable around adults than their unpredictable adolescent peers. There were other hints too: sensory issues common to people on the autism spectrum and their painful hyperawareness of other people’s micro-expressions and body language. They aren’t a fan of the heavy waterproofs and thermals that come with filming in the cold Canadian wilderness – “too much stuff on my body”, they explain, fidgeting as if remembering it now in person.

Their autism, they point out, actually improves their craft. “I’ve always been watching and learning from people. Having to learn more manually how to socialise and interact with the people around me has helped me with acting.” Being on set, too, offers a routine: “I have a call time, and I’m told what to wear, how to stand, where to stand and what to eat.” They describe the diagnosis as “freeing… It enables me to walk through the world with more grace towards myself about not being able to do the easy everyday tasks that everyone else seems to be able to do.”

A few weeks later we meet in east London, in a rough-hewn pottery studio where we’ve come to try our hand at a potter’s wheel – Ramsey’s idea, not mine. They haven’t used clay since their primary school art class, but they’ve been hankering to make a teapot, something that our instructor gently cautions is maybe a little ambitious.

“This is a lot harder than it looks in Ghost,” I joke as I produce a saucer-shaped splodge on the wheel. Ramsey, looking appropriately artistic in paint-splattered jeans from trans-owned fashion label Both& Apparel and a navy New Balance cap, is politely mystified – they’re too young to have watched the film. “I haven’t seen a lot of movies,” they demur, generously offering me, an embarrassed millennial, an olive branch. They did, however, recently watch Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name on a plane. “It became a special interest, for sure,” they say. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it – I wrote a song about it.” This isn’t wholly unexpected – Ramsey is a mean guitarist and has uploaded the occasional self-penned song to their Insta Stories. Today, though, they huff a little with self-consciousness at the memory, as a perfect-looking dog bowl emerges from under their hands. “It’s so crazy how much loving something can hurt because of how much you love it.”

Over lunch at a neighbourhood vegan café a short walk away – an unassuming, crunchy, hippie spot where both the tofu “eggs” Benedict and tofu Florentine has sold out – Ramsey updates me on their last few weeks. They’ve just returned from some The Last of Us reshoots, including one that was filmed in the bowels of Vancouver Aquarium, and apologise for “being out of it” the last time we met, even though I barely noticed. “Being back at work sorted me out,” they say with satisfaction as they tuck into a toastie and a peppermint tea.

There are elements to being an actor that they don’t entirely love – the glare of public scrutiny, for one. It’s partly why they don’t like to discuss their family or relationships in too much detail, although they do tell me that they were “properly in love” for the first time while shooting the new season of The Last of Us. Ever the professional, Ramsey draws it back to work. In the upcoming episodes, Ellie is pulling away from father figure Joel and experiencing the first pangs of love with her best friend, Dina: “Experiencing that while I was filming the show was really special.” While Ramsey won’t be drawn on the object of their dating life, Reddit fans spotted Ramsey last year on Nashville star Maisy Stella’s Instagram Stories, where they were described as “the coolest comfiest most wonderful human imaginable”.

In 2023, Ramsey came out as nonbinary in an interview with The New York Times and has since described themselves as “not one hundred per cent straight”. “I would always call myself a tomboy growing up,” they say today. “My Club Penguin name was Tomboy Bella.” There’s a flash of mischief in those hazel eyes as they recall the online platform beloved of tweens in the 2000s. “That was the one rebellious thing I did as a kid: set up a Club Penguin account against my parents’ wishes.”

They’re still figuring out how they feel about coming out so young. “Part of the job of being an actor is that you’re supposed to have an answer to every question that people ask you,” they explain. “But actually the answer can be: ‘I don’t know and I’m not ready to talk about that,’ and that’s something that I’m still figuring out.” They compare this with their autism diagnosis. “The label of being autistic has been so helpful to me because that’s helped me to understand myself, but gender and sexuality-wise, labels do not feel comfy for me in any capacity, because I feel like I’m putting myself into a box. I feel trapped.” At a Letters Live show last year, where actors stage readings of literary correspondence, they read a letter to themselves: “You don’t have to know. You can just be, and be proud.”

“It does make me a bit sad that people who aren’t in the public eye can explore their gender identity or sexuality in private,” they say slowly. “That’s a privilege I don’t really get any more. If I did want to explore other things, like facets of my gender identity, that would be done publicly. As much as I would try and keep it private, if someone recognises me on the street, say if I’m presenting differently, [and] takes a photo, then that is just talked about.”

In contrast, their reason for talking about their autism, Ramsey says, is a combination of ease and self-confidence – they’re able to “unmask immediately” if they tell someone about their condition. And yes, they do seem more relaxed now they’ve said it, compared to the dryly funny but slightly shy person who picked me up at the train station. “My experience of moving through the world is as an autistic person,” they say. “There’s no reason for people not to know.”

It’s an assured statement from someone just entering their 20s. I’m drawn back to their friend Pascal’s words – Ramsey is still in the early chapters of their life. There’s a watchfulness to them, and a grit. At one point, they surprise me with the statement: “You can’t be an ethical billionaire.” (We’re discussing the state of the world, which we both agree is not good.) “I remember when I first heard that [saying], I was like, ‘Surely you can be.’ But now I’ve thought about it. If you’ve acquired enough wealth to be a billionaire, you’re not giving enough of it away.” They cackle. “I really don’t understand how you [can] have so much power and not use it in a way that’s beneficial to the development of the world. But I guess people like Elon Musk think they are developing the world – and they are in one way, but maybe to the detriment of literally everybody else around them.”

On the set of Catherine Called Birdy, Dunham recalls, Ramsey acquired the nickname Beter Ban. “As cute and jokey as that was, a character like Peter Pan – a person between childhood and adulthood, innocence and knowing, a male role that was historically done on stage by people assigned female at birth – really speaks to the flexibility and suppleness of Bella’s presence.”

They certainly understand, as they enter adulthood in earnest, that they need to protect their peace – though the jobs keep coming. (In the coming weeks, they’ll film George Jaques’s Sunny Dancer, alongside fellow new-gen Brits Louis Partridge and Ruby Stokes.) Ramsey turned 21 in September and spent it with their family. “We went to a castle that we used to go to a lot when I was younger and literally did my seven-year-old birthday again.” They were coming off the back of 15-hour shoot days and were desperate to be home. “I don’t have a friend group. I never have,” they tell me. Their friends are scattered to the winds, in cities all over the world – a byproduct of growing up on film sets and befriending other actors and crew members. Fame has changed things too. “The idea of going out celebrating with friends just isn’t really something that I can do.”

They gather themselves. “I often get referred to as an old soul, which I like,” Ramsey tells me, draining the last of their tea. So what happens when an old soul turns 25, then 30, I ask? “Maybe I’ll just be ancient,” they shoot back. Last night, they tell me, they had a sudden urge to go out to a club and dance. They stayed put in the end, but who knows where the future might take them – a rave in Dalston, perhaps? “I think getting old will be interesting, especially as someone outside of the gender binary.” They smile. “I’m kind of curious as to how that’s gonna go.”

The Last of Us will be on Sky Atlantic and Now from 14 April