Why Casting Kaitlyn Dever as Abby Will Give Us a Very Different Season 2 of The Last of Us – The Last of Us (HBO Max)

The speculation is finally over. As many of us have come to expect over the past few weeks and months, Kaitlyn Dever has landed arguably the biggest role in The Last of Us season two. Abby is an important part of the second game, set in Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic future. and so it was always vital to do this casting.

HBO did it? Well, I’ll go out on a limb and say yes. Anyone with eyes to see can see that Abby in the game is very different from Dever, which at first glance may seem strange considering how similar Joel and Ellie are from the video game and the show. But even if HBO hadn’t bothered to find a muscular woman who could act well, the company would still have found other gold in Dever.

Before we get into why I think this is a great casting choice, I want to give a little background. spoiler warning for The Last of Us: Part II, in case you haven’t played it yet and haven’t seen the main plot points of the game. Okay, are you ready? I think even if Kaitlyn Dever doesn’t look like she has the strength to drive a golf club through a man’s skull yet, there’s a brilliant meta story behind her being played by Abby.

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If you don’t know, back then Dever was originally cast for the role of Ellie. This was before The Last of Us became the HBO show it is today, but it still seems pretty interesting that she’s brought back now. This is especially interesting considering how it can be argued that Dever actually looks a lot like Ellie in the games.

In The Last of Us: Part II, Ellie and Abby are often physically adjacent. Abby is a brute, capable of taking down runners with just her fists and easily intimidating everyone around her just by standing and crouching. Ellie, on the other hand, had to fight and fight every step of the way. She’s skinnier, skinnier, and she’s always had to be smarter in the way she fights. These physical differences seem to matter less and less as the game progresses, and we see similarities between our dual protagonists in The Last of Us: Part II. With Kaitlyn Dever playing the role of Abby, not only will we be able to see the similarities in the revenge stories of these two, but from minute one we will be able to connect Ellie and Abby in terms of how similar they are to each other. A little “We’re not so different, you and I” situation, but instead of waiting until the end to fully understand it, we will be able to see its development and grasp all the similarities between them much earlier.

By the way, this is all assuming that Dever isn’t going to try to put on about 30 pounds of muscle. I’m sure she could if she wanted to, but I think it would be more interesting if she didn’t. One of the complaints people had about the first season was that while it delivered what fans asked for, it was – with the exception of the third episode – pretty much a one-to-one recreation of the game’s plot. which means that if you played The Last of Us, you’ve already seen the show. Dever being a different Abby will change that. Fans of both the series and the games will be entering into the unknown to some extent, as while those who have played The Last of Us: Part II will be able to tell what will happen next, there will likely be some changes to how those events will happen.

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It will also be easier to switch to Abby’s point of view via television. We can switch between them in episodes where Ellie tracks her down and Abby goes on her own journey. This isn’t so much a question of Dever’s casting as it is a question of how I think Season 2 could improve Abby’s perception. From an audience perspective, she’ll be a villain from the moment she shows off the results of her golf lessons, but if we’re trying to build sympathy for Abby throughout seasons two and three, we… we’ll need a little more time spent with her early on, and don’t just use her point of view as bait in the middle of the story.

Dever’s casting may also help with that. Again, looking at Abby in the game, her physique just screams end-level boss. She’s a powerhouse, and even if Dever trains hard, she’ll still have a hard time recreating that, and that’s a good thing. This offers some difference and will hopefully give us the opportunity to make Abby feel less like the two-dimensional character she appears to be at the start of The Last of Us: Part II, and more like the character she becomes throughout the journey the game takes us on .

Do you agree? How do you think Abby should be handled in The Last of Us Season 2? Let us know!