HBO’s The Last of Us TV show arrives early in 2023, and the trailers have already created a buzz — both among fans of games and people simply hyped for a Pedro Pascal zombie show with Bella Ramsey, aka Game of Thrones Lyanna Mormont, along for the ride. The Last of Us on HBO adapts the popular post-apocalyptic video game series from Naughty Dog and Sony. Production on the HBO Last of Us show is headed up by Craig Mazin, creator of the acclaimed miniseries Chernobyl, and Neil Druckmann, writer and director of The Last of Us games. Here’s why Pedro Pascal’s next series is already creating conversations.
HBO is bringing the acclaimed video game The Last of Us to life. On the surface, The Last of Us is a typical zombie apocalypse show, but much like the games, both the narrative and setting offer so much more. While the iconic clickers are guaranteed to terrify audiences, the Last of Us HBO trailers already show they’re not the main attraction. It’s the characters, Pedro Pascal’s Joel and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie, that take center stage over The Cordyceps Brain Infection that’s turned most of humanity into violent, mindless creatures. Here’s everything you need to know about HBO’s The Last Of Us TV series, including release date, story detail, and cast.
HBO’s The Last Of Us Release Date
The Last Of Us releases on HBO and HBO Max on January 15, 2023. The wait has been a long time coming for fans of The Last of Us games, the first of which was released way back in 2013, almost exactly a decade before The Last of Us TV series release date on HBO. Demand for a live-action Last of Us adaptation emerged almost as soon as the first game released on PS3. Now, nearly ten years later, The Last Of Us is debuting on HBO. Joel and Ellie’s story — a Writers Guild of America 2014 Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing winner — can finally reach the wider audience it deserves in January 2023.
The Last Of Us TV Series Cast
The cast for HBO’s The Last Of Us show has been slowly revealed over the years since the show’s initial announcement in March 2020. Despite both the show and the games being full of tense moments involving Cordyceps-infected clickers and post-apocalyptic spectacle, it’s the characters and cast of The Last of Us that will ensnare viewers. The original The Last of Us video game follows two survivors, Joel and Ellie, as they struggle to cross the United States in search of a cure for the Cordyceps infection. Seeing their dynamic in live-action is what has fans of the game so invested in who HBO cast in The Last Of Us.
HBO clearly understood just how important nailing the casting of Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us was. As revealed early on in the promo, teasers, and trailers for The Last of Us, Joel Miller is being played by the Mandalorian himself, Pedro Pascal. Like the games, Pascal’s Joel on The Last of Us TV show is a troubled smuggler unwillingly pulled into trying to save the world. His companion/cargo, the Cordyceps-immune 14-year-old Ellie, will be played by Bella Ramsey. Just like Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey also appeared in HBO’s Game of Thrones, where Pascal played Oberyn Martell and Ramsey played Lyanna Mormont.
Alongside Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, HBO has announced an entire ensemble cast for The Last Of Us. The HBO adaptation features characters from the games, as well as new ones created for the show. Here’s the cast for HBO’s The Last Of Us as is known so far:
HBO’s The Last Of Us Story Details
The story in The Last of Us TV series will focus on and adapt the full events of the first game, telling the story of how Joel and Ellie meet and their original journey together. Mazin and Druckmann have said that the show will expand on the game’s original story content, fleshing out what’s already there rather than removing any characters or narrative elements. That means nothing from the games will be radically undone or de-canonized, but there’ll be more details that didn’t fit in the games. The inclusion of new characters like Jeffrey Price’s Perry, and the expanded role of previously-minor Last of Us game character Frank, no doubt factor into this.
The producers have also said that material from The Last of Us Part II could be included in the HBO show, but that would likely manifest in minor ways. The odds point to a series primarily focused on the first game, with late seasons teasing the second installment in relatively small ways, potentially with an introduction of a young Abby at the Firefly compound. HBO’s The Last of Us seems to be keeping the game’s award-winning story intact. As well as keeping fans happy, this means that audiences unfamiliar with the games who are just interested in the new Pedro Pascal HBO show are definitely in for a treat, too.
The Last Of Us Trailer
The first footage from The Last of Us from HBO arrived during the premier of House of the Dragon in August 2022, but it wasn’t until September that a teaser trailer was released. With the initial teaser for The Last of Us live adaptation, HBO was surprisingly generous with how much they revealed. There were several lingering glimpses of Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsay as Ellie, as well as plenty of snippets of apocalyptic carnage. Even the iconic Clickers were given a chance to show just how much dread and suspense they’ll be creating in the new format. Following this teaser the first full-length trailer for The Last of Us came, but not until December 2022.
In this latest trailer for The Last of Us, viewers were given chance to get their first proper experience of Pascal’s Joel and Ramsay’s Ellie in action. Much of the rest of The Last of Us cast was revealed or further shown too, including Nick Offerman’s Bill and Storm Reid’s Riley. This new The Last of Us trailer also showcased some of the impressive cinematography and sprawling apocalyptic set-pieces. This trailer also firmly established the core premise of The Last of Us‘s plot — that Ellie is infected, and Joel must take her west.
The Last Of Us On HBO – Format And Runtime
The Last of Us debuts on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, January 15th, 2023, and will be available to stream in 4K for HBO Max customers. There will be 9 episodes of The Last of Us, each with a runtime of around an hour. With episodes airing weekly, The Last of Us will be keeping viewers on the edge of their seats until March 2023. The Last of Us took just under a year to shoot. Not only is it the first time HBO has ventured into the realm of video-game adaptations, but it’s also the largest TV production in Canadian history (The Last of Us was filmed mostly in Alberta).
The Live-Action Clickers Are Already Terrifying
While Joel and Ellie are at the core of The Last of Us, the show is also bringing one of the most harrowing monsters in video game history to live-action — the Clickers. The Cordyceps fungus in The Last of Us doesn’t just turn infected into World War Z or 28 Days Later-style living zombies, nor are they undead shamblers like The Walking Dead’s Walkers. While earlier stages of the Cordyceps brain infection certainly have parallels to typical zombies, the Clicker stage (the 3rd of 4 stages of infection) turns unfortunate victims into something else entirely.
The Clickers in The Last of Us get their name from the continual clicking sound they emit, a form of echolocation. They need this because the fungal protrusion from their skull have rendered them blind. As the trailers for The Last of Us already reveal, Joel and Ellie hiding defenseless while a blind, eyeless Clicker tries to sound out their location is already a recipe for some incredibly tense television. While The Last of Us games had many variations of Cordyceps infected, it was the Clickers that really resonated with players. What’s been shown of The Last of Us TV series has been received incredibly warmly by fans of the games — the fact that HBO clearly hasn’t overlooked the importance of the Clickers is definitely a contributing factor.