This interview contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 and the game the series is adapting.
It seems as if for as long as The Last of Us’ Abby has existed, there has been controversy surrounding her character. The Last of Us Part II received polarized reactions from fans, with some adoring its complexities and others despising the game and character so much that original Abby voice actress Laura Bailey (Critical Role, The Legend of Vox Machina) received death threats against her and her son. The news that Kaitlyn Dever had been cast in the role for HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation sparked a whole new kind of drama, with some frustrated by Dever’s stature. In the game, Abby has two defining characteristics: her rage and her muscles. According to The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann, the muscles weren’t important for the adaptation. And, according to Kaitlyn Dever, her version of Abby is “so much more” than her rage.
In an interview with IGN, co-creators Druckmann, Craig Mazin, and Kaitlyn Dever broke down the changes to Abby Anderson as her journey shifts slightly from the source material.
“Once we cast someone, you can’t help but see them like they become part of the DNA of this character,” says Druckmann. “Kaitlyn Dever is different from Laura Bailey, who played Abby in the video game. And that informs a lot of how we think about the character.”
Outside of her physical appearance, we haven’t seen a lot of changes to Abby just yet. Though the story did shift the order of events, offering up the reason for Abby’s revenge immediately rather than revealing her motives gradually throughout the story, her traits remain largely the same. However, that may not always be the case.
“A lot of the fundamentals of her are the same, but just like the moment to moment […] the medium that creates certain changes that, sometimes, have a butterfly effect and the changes become greater over time,” Druckmann notes.
For Mazin, it was about highlighting the cut-scene moments from the game that he felt warranted more time. “How do you fill that space? What pops out?” he wonders. “In general, what I think we do is try to deepen the complexities and the parts of these characters.” In that same vein it was “really important” to both Mazin and Druckmann that they “deepen the complexities and the parts of these characters” so the audience can really feel what the character was feeling and live in the moment with them.
As far as Dever is concerned, it’s those complexities that give the show the opportunity to really shine. “We are given that space to explore her emotion,” she says. “She’s so much more than her rage and anger. And I think that what’s different about the show is that we are given a little bit more context to Abby when we first meet her.”
As we see in the opening sequence of “Through the Valley,” The Last of Us Season 2’s second episode, Dever’s Abby is deeply and profoundly sad. In her dream, her present self tries to stop the five-years-earlier version from entering the room where she will find her father’s corpse. Her past self does not listen and enters the room anyway, resulting in tears streaming down present Abby’s face as she stands helplessly by, unable to stop the moment from happening and unable to free herself from the pain it caused.
It’s that grief that will play a pivotal role in the adaptation’s Abby, Dever confirms adding that “the show talks a lot about grief in so many different ways and in different forms and I think that that’s what is at the core of a lot of these people’s storylines and emotions is that exactly.”
