Along with a preview of tonight's Season 2 finale of HBO's The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann compares the video game and show versions of Ellie.
After an intense and heartbreaking flashback episode last week, HBO and Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann's Pedro Pascal (Joel), Bella Ramsey (Ellie), Kaitlyn Dever (Abby), and Isabela Merced (Dina)-starring The Last of Us finds itself storming into its Season 2 finale tonight. Before you check out tonight's sneak peek and image gallery, we have a look at where things stand with Ellie heading into tonight's season ender and where her mindset is heading into next season. For fans out there looking for insights from the video games, Druckmann discussed with Deadline Hollywood the similarities and differences between the game and live-action series versions of Ellie.
"There's a few decisions we made early on that has separated this Ellie's journey from game Ellie's journey a little bit. In the game, it was important to me for Ellie to get into this really dark headspace and be unable to kind of get out of it for a while, because...you have to commit a lot more violence than you do in the show. Whereas in the game, by the time she gets to Nora, she would have already killed a bunch of people, including some of the people responsible for Joel's death, really, in the show, the first one is Nora," Druckmann explained.
"So, she's on this journey, and I don't know if she really understands what this journey means, until this point now, when she gets to Nora, and this is a moment where she's trying to be like Joel. She's trying to commit to this like, 'I will do whatever it takes to go forward on this journey and find out where Abby is.' Now we see the darkness that's been brewing underneath that. She's been doing a good job of hiding different than game Ellie, not necessarily better or worse. They're just slightly different on their journeys, even if the destination is the same. But now that she's committed this act, the question we want to explore is, can you come back from something so horrific?"