How Kaitlyn Dever nearly played Ellie in The Last of Us movie before Abby role in HBO series: 'It was pretty surreal'

Dever also looks back on her history with "The Last of Us" creators at Naughty Dog and playing Cassie Drake for the "Uncharted 4" video game.

A core memory related to The Last of Us is seared into Kaitlyn Dever's mind. She doesn't remember how old she was exactly, but years before HBO developed the acclaimed 2013 video game into an equally lauded TV drama, the Booksmart and Apple Cider Vinegar star, now 28, walked through the Santa Monica, Calif.-based headquarters for gaming studio Naughty Dog.

In 2014, Screen Gems announced plans to turn the title, about the journey of hardened survivor Joel and teenage companion Ellie across a pandemic-scarred America, into a movie. Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead, Spider-Man) was eventually going to direct. Neil Druckmann, a co-creator on the game, gave a young Dever a tour of Naughty Dog in the hopes that she would play Ellie in the film.

"I would literally meet Neil at Naughty Dog and he would walk me around and show me how they created the game," Dever tells Entertainment Weekly. "And they were actually making the second game when I was there." The Last of Us Part II, set five years after the events of The Last of Us, wouldn't release until 2020, but she had an exclusive sneak peek at the early makings of the sequel. "I was seeing the first drawings of older Ellie, and he told me what happens, too," Dever recalls, though she clarifies she didn't know the name Abby at the time. "Talk about spoiler alerts... He did ask me, 'Do you want to know what happens?' I was like, 'Yeah, tell me!' So I've been keeping that secret for years."

The movie, however, never came together. As of 2015, Druckmann told Game Informer that they assembled various actors for a table read of the current script. Dever was one of those actors reading for Ellie. But by 2016, Druckmann relayed to IGN how the movie "entered development hell" and hadn't been worked on "in over a year and a half." Dever, however, remained in the Naughty Dog family.

"When that was no longer happening, Neil asked me to do Uncharted 4," she says, referring to her role as Cassie Drake, the daughter of the game franchise's chief adventurer Nathan Drake (Nolan North) and his longtime love interest Elena Fisher (Emily Rose). Dever's Cassie appears at the very end of 2016's Uncharted 4: A Thief's End in a playable epilogue. "It was so cool to do because I'd never done mo-cap work," she recalls. "The extent of mo-cap knowledge I had was just watching behind-the-scenes of Andy Serkis doing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. It definitely wasn't Gollum vibes [for Cassie], it was really just basic teenager energy, but very cool to get to work with him on that."

Dever remained on Druckmann's mind over the years, especially as Hollywood circled back around to adapt The Last of Us, this time as a TV series. With Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) co-developing the material into a drama series for HBO as a showrunner with Druckmann, the pair released their game 1 adaptation in 2023. Over the course of an eight-episode freshman season, Pedro Pascal starred in the role of Joel and Bella Ramsey starred as Ellie. Dever was too old by that time to play a 14-year-old on screen, but, as Druckmann tells EW separately, "What she has is the spirit of things."

HBO proved eager to continue The Last of Us with season 2, which will now begin to adapt the events of the Part II video game, starting with the premiere episode Sunday, April 13. Druckmann credits his creative partner, Mazin, with the idea of casting Dever as Abby, the crucial new addition to the story who has profound impacts on the events to come. Dever remembers getting a call from her agent about the showrunners wanting to sit down for a meeting. "I had already seen season 1, and I was obsessed with it," she confesses. "And, yeah, they just asked me to play Abby, which was crazy, so crazy."

It all feels to Dever like one of those stranger-than-fiction moments. The Last of Us games felt like a continuous topic of conversation in her household, as they became bonding moments for her and her dad. "It's his favorite thing," she says. By the time Druckmann and Mazin offered her the season 2 role, she had already played through half of Part II and knew who Abby was.

"Sometimes I'm like, 'Oh well, I really wanted that thing and it didn't happen.' But I believe that the things that are meant to be in your life will be in your life," she remarks. "I always thought about The Last of Us.... I would say it was pretty surreal when it came back around in my life in a different way."

Without getting into spoilers, this connection Dever has to the legacy of The Last of Us feels poetic to the story of season 2 itself. One of the things she spoke with Mazin and Druckmann in that casting meeting, she says, were the parallels between Abby and Ellie. "They both have rage," she says. "It just shows up differently for both of them because they're two different people, but they are mirrors for each other."