Spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 2
Summary
- Bella Ramsey discusses challenges with Joel’s death scene & handling comparisons to Ellie.
- Ramsey opens up about deactivating social media due to online trolls and toxic comments.
- The brutal portrayal of Joel’s death scene in The Last of Us Season 2 hit viewers hard.
Now that the dust has settled on that heartbreaking episode 2 of The Last of Us Season 2, Bella Ramsey opens up about the comparisons to the video game character Ellie and deactivating social media accounts. Needless to say, the latest episode of HBO’s post-apocalyptic drama was not only a wild rollercoaster ride of pain and sorrow due to the brutal death of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, but viewers also witnessed the downfall of the one place that kept everyone safe in a cold and cruel world: Jackson.
Even though players of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2 knew the moment that traumatized them from the game would very likely be in the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us season 2, that shocking Joel moment hit many harder than they could have ever imagined. Hearing Joel get beaten to death by Abby, due to the hardened survivor murdering her father at the Firefly Hospital, was almost too much to handle for most viewers, but the heart-wrenching cries of Ellie as she watched was almost even worse. In The Last of Us Season 1, which is a scene adapted from the game, Ellie tells Sam that the thing she is afraid of most is ending up alone, and now, this is exactly what happened in Season 2. As fans wait for more episodes to reveal what Ellie will do next on her quest for revenge, Ramsey discusses how they dealt with seeing Pedro beaten and bloodied, as well as being initially hard on themselves for not looking like the Naughty Dog character.
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Bella Ramsey Discusses How They Dealt With Ellie Comparisons and Online Trolls
In an interview with THR, Bella Ramsey revealed that they had a hard time with Joel’s death when it came to filming that brutal scene. Ramsey stated that they “almost went too far and made it too normal and pretended it wasn’t happening”, but expressed that they had to have that mindset because if they thought about it too much, the stress and anxiety of what was occurring would become far too much. If it seemed as though Ramsey’s portrayal of Ellie crying on the floor after witnessing Joel get stuck in the neck with a golf club seemed realistic, that’s likely because it was so when the moment finally came, with Ramsey sobbing and pinned to the floor, “It just all came out.”
“I just want to make sure that the future characters I play feel different to Ellie. Not because I don’t love playing Ellie, but I want to have a new challenge. I want to be scared of a project and a character and not know whether I can do it — that’s the dream.”
Ramsey also talks about how they had a personal challenge about not looking like Ellie from Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2. The star revealed that they, at one stage, became “quite fixated on the way that Ellie looks in the game and her physical stature.” Ramsey said that they didn’t have the same muscle type as Ellie from the game, and this played on their mind, but after talking with showrunner Craig Mazin at length about Ellie’s appearance, the main point Mazin wanted to get across is that Ellie would “look strong and feel strong,” and that Mazin “never put that expectation” on Ramsey to look like her. However, they did disclose that it was still “a challenge for me to let myself off the hook for not looking computer-generated.”
As many fans of the series have seen, online toxicity towards Ramsey for not looking like Ellie was like a wildfire of hate that seemed to spread across all platforms. Thankfully, Ramsey was wise enough not to be a part of it, opting to deactivate their social media accounts a few months ago to avoid further exposure to how ridiculous and cruel it all is. “I always knew that I’d [deactivate] it one day and never even really wanted to have social media in the first place,” Ramsey says. “It wasn’t like this big dramatic thing, but there was an element of it that was thinking about the show coming out for season two. If I just avoid Twitter and Reddit, which I’m now doing, then everything’s totally fine.”
The Last of Us Season 2 streams on Max, with new episodes dropping every Sunday.
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Source: THR
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