Yahoo Sports The Last of Us game star Ashley Johnson on playing Ellie's mom: 'It's surreal and bizarre'
Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Last of Us season 1 finale.
Ashley Johnson feels the weight of her role in HBO's The Last of Us. The actress originated the role of Ellie in the 2013 video game about a teenage girl with an unexplainable immunity to a fungal plague that transformed the world's infected into ravenous monsters. Now with the live-action series adaptation, Johnson gives birth to the character for a second time — in a much more literal sense.
Johnson arrives in the season 1 finale's opening flashback sequence as Anna, Ellie's mom, who goes into labor while fending off an Infected. "It's wild. It's surreal and bizarre," the actress tells EW of getting this opportunity. "To be able to give birth to the character and to also be the first character to fight to keep Ellie alive... Yeah, the layers of it are not lost on me."
Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann relish the poetic nature of this particular casting. "That, to me, is one of the most fulfilling moments of the production and the show, because I'm a fan of the game and I'm a fan of Ashley's," Mazin says during a virtual press conference with reporters. "As I often say, Troy Baker" — the original Joel in the game — "disappears into a thousand roles. I can't believe he has all the different characters he plays. But Ashley sounds like Ellie, and Ellie sounds like Ashley. So she's already this quasi-mythological creature to me. To see her giving birth to herself in a sense, and to create that genetic connection between her performances, Ellie and the origin story of Bella [Ramsey] as Ellie, was just profound."
Liane Hentscher/HBO Ashley Johnson on 'The Last of Us'
Johnson has been living with the character of Ellie for more than a decade. She began acting for the first game, including motion-capture and voice performances, in 2010 opposite Baker as Joel. It's a role she kept returning to for 2014's Left Behind, the DLC (downloadable content) mini-game about Ellie's relationship with Riley; and 2020's The Last of Us Part II, the formal sequel. For this work, Johnson was recognized with two BAFTA Games Awards and one Spike TV Game Award.
"It felt so small and intimate and collaborative, and still to this day is one of the most creatively fulfilling things I've ever worked on," the actress recalls of her experience making those games. "There are different levels of collaboration. Most of the time it's, 'Here's what you gotta say. Bring your thing to it.' And that's it. In some ways, we were all building these characters together."
As the source material developed, Druckmann, one of the games' creators, was toying with the idea of telling another story set in the world of The Last of Us — the story of Ellie's mom. Naughty Dog, the developers behind the video games, were creating additional material to help promote The Last of Us. One such element was American Dreams, the comic book about Ellie and Riley that would be adapted into Left Behind.
Druckmann was thinking of something similar for Anna. At first, the plan was to create an animated short. "I wrote this short script about Ellie's mom and how she gave birth to Ellie, was bitten at the same time, wasn't sure if she was infected during that birth," Druckmann says. "It just became a little character drama that felt like it spoke to the same themes of parental love for their child and how much you're willing to do even when you're on death's door."
Naughty Dog, Sony Interactive Entertainment Ashley Johnson performs as Ellie through motion-capture in 'The Last of Us Part II'
When that deal broke apart, he toyed with turning the concept into an entirely new The Last of Us game, but those talks would also fall through. "Then I became interested in live-action," he recalls. "So I'm like, 'Oh! We actually do it as a short.' I was talking to Ashley Johnson about her starring it, and then we both got busy, so that fell apart."
Johnson remembers that conversation. "There were so many different versions of this over the past decade of what he's wanted to do with Anna. That was way back in the day," she says. "But, you know, as life goes on, some things happen, some things don't."
A movie version of The Last of Us with director Sam Raimi attached also came and went over the years. Druckmann finally returned to the Anna idea in earnest when developing the HBO series with Mazin. "Neil had texted me and he is like, 'Hey, Craig and I were talking and we would love for you to play a scene where you play Anna,'" Johnson recalls. "I just burst into tears."
Even now, Johnson can't believe she still gets to be a part of this story, despite her crucial role in creating it. "That's not the norm for video game adaptations," she explains. "Usually the voiceover or motion-capture actors don't also go along to the screen adaptation. So I think there was a little bit of shock there and also a lot of emotion."
According to Druckmann, Johnson contacted him before her first day of shooting her Anna scenes. They had become close friends after making the games, but he wasn't going to be on set with her and the anxiety was apparently kicking in.
Liane Hentscher/HBO Marlene (Merle Dandridge) cradles a baby Ellie in the opening to 'The Last of Us' season 1 finale
"This is one of the first times she did anything The Last of Us that I wasn't directing," Druckmann remembers. "So before that shoot, she called me. She was all nervous, like, 'I don't know how to do this. I wish you were here.' The thing I told her, which I wasn't lying, I felt totally confident saying this, [was], 'Craig is there. Trust Craig.' He's been my co-parent now for all these months. I felt comfortable leaving the set for months at a time because I saw the love he had for the material, and I think that gave her some ease to say, 'OK, someone else is watching me, someone else that really loves and cares about these characters.' And I told her, 'Just do what you do, which is collaborate.'"
Johnson admits she had a fear of letting someone else take over the character of Ellie, but she believes it would've been scarier if the show ended up being bad. Ramsey, she says, has elevated the part in ways she hadn't even thought of when she was playing the teen.
"There's been so many moments where I've been like, 'Gosh! That is taking it to another level that we didn't get to in the game.' So many moments where Ellie's been strong in standing up for herself, and moments that I'm like, 'Oh, I wish when I was Ellie I would've been able to do that, 'cause that would've felt good.'"
All the fears she once had are now gone. She just hopes, as the Ellie originator, that Ramsey now has to space to make the character her own heading into season 2 and beyond. Just as Mazin and Druckmann don't see a distinction between Johnson and Ellie, the actress has similar praise to bestow upon Ramsey: "I mean, she is Ellie. She absolutely blows me away."
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