‘The Last Of Us’ Didn’t Ask Kaitlyn Dever To Bulk Up To Play Abby

It may be an odd question, but one that fans certainly have had heading into The Last of Us season 2. Would they find an actress with Abby’s extremely muscular physique to play the character, or if not, would she have to bulk up to play her?

The answer, we now know, is no.

When actress Kaitlyn Dever was cast, it seemed almost impossible this was the case, as if you’ve seen her films or on the red carpet she is just…not an imposing presence at 5’2, shall we say, and getting her to “Abby level,” especially in the relatively short time between casting and filming seemed unlikely to happen without potentially damaging tactics, shall we say.

Here’s Neil Druckmann on why they didn’t bother:

“We would’ve struggled to find someone as good as Kaitlyn to play this role,” Druckmann told EW. “In the game, you have to play both characters [Ellie and Abby]

and we need them to play differently. We needed Ellie to feel smaller and kind of maneuver around, and Abby was meant to play more like Joel in that she's almost like a brute in the way she can physically manhandle certain things. That doesn't play as big of a role in this version of the story because there's not as much violent action moment to moment. It's more about the drama. I'm not saying there's no action here. It's just, again, different priorities and how you approach it.”

I did wonder about this, as the difference in size did seem to be mostly about gameplay in TLOU2, something crafted for the games to make Ellie and Abby feel different to play. But here, in the show, simply showing Abby as huge feels less important. And Druckmann is right in that there are few actress with Abby’s build, which would make the casting pool far smaller.

Dever seems like a great choice, as she has a history with Naughty Dog (she played Nathan Drake’s daughter), she’s an amazing actress (watch “Unbelievable”) and she looks the part to a certain extent, face-wise. She actually looks like a cross between Abby and Ellie, and she did actually read for Ellie at one point.

As for any fight scenes, I’m sure they could still be brutal. Dever will be at least a little bigger than Ellie’s Bella Ramsey who is very small in real life. Ramsey has posted videos of them working out for season 2, but again, another issue is that with the five year jump between games, Ellie gets taller, older and more imposing herself. You can’t really have that same kind of physical transformation here.

I have faith this is all going to work out well, given how all this played out in season 1. We’ll no doubt get more info soon, and hopefully another trailer.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.