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The Last of Us: Why HBO are Right Not to Use Lookalikes
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey have been cast in an adaptation of video game The Last of Us — but should the TV iterations look more like their digital counterparts?
When I was 10, I was convinced the geeky young kid from BBC sitcom My Family would star in the upcoming movie adaptation of Harry Potter. He looked just like Harry Potter in my head and, indeed, the bespectacled boy wizard on the cover of J.K Rowling’s book. While my hunch leant heavily on his ability to wear glasses, I nonetheless felt he would be perfect casting.
And that young actor (Gabriel Thomson) was briefly rumoured to have bagged the role, despite the fact he would’ve been 15 by the time Philosopher’s Stone (2001) came out. Ultimately, of course, he didn’t play Harry Potter, because casting someone because they look good in glasses is like casting James Bond purely because they look cool sipping a Martini.
Last week HBO announced that Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey have been cast as Joel and Ellie in their adaptation of Naughty Dog’s hit survival-horror video game The Last of Us. The social media reaction was tempered with scepticism, which isn’t unusual for a major casting announcement. But what’s interesting, in this case, is that many seem to feel that Pascal and Ramsey are “bad casting” because they don’t closely resemble Joel and Ellie’s in-game likenesses — or at least not as much as some other actors do.
Before examining this peculiar trend, the first thing to say is that Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey are, in their own rights, excellent casting for Joel and Ellie. Both delivered scene-stealing performances in HBO behemoth Game of Thrones, in only relatively short amounts of screen time. Pascal has since become a pop culture icon as the eponymous masked bounty hunter in Disney+’s The Mandalorian. And Ramsey, an alumnus of Nottingham’s famous Television Workshop, already has a BAFTA to her name. Pre-judge her at your peril, internet!
Since it was first reported that HBO were adapting The Last of Us, any related Twitter post from a major entertainment outlet prompts a common reply. Here, for example, are IGN, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter announcing the recent casting news. Scroll down and you’ll find many stills of video game Joel and Ellie alongside headshots of actors with whom they share some resemblance. There are many more posts where people stated casting preferences based on nothing more than a superficial physical likeness.
So which lookalikes do people prefer? For Joel, these include Josh Brolin, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Hugh Jackman. What do these three have in common? They, like Joel, are bearded and often play brooding characters. But, crucially, the Twitter images used are only ever images in which these actors sport a rugged beard, raggedy short hair and a broody disposition — i.e. they’re superficially Joel-esque. It’s most telling in Hugh Jackman’s case as he’s most often cited using stills from Logan (2017), but never stills from, say, The Greatest Showman (2017).
Logan, intriguingly, is a role that does parallel Joel in ways beyond their likeness. Both are tasked with transporting a young child across a desolate, dangerous landscape. And while initially reluctant to open up, they ultimately form an intensely protective father-like bond with their charge. Now, you may be ahead of me here but… that is also the core narrative of The Mandalorian. So if Pascal has no trouble portraying a violent loner, who forms an endearing personal connection with their human cargo, why weren’t people posting pictures of him side-by-side with Joel?
Ellie’s lookalike list is shorter by comparison, but has two clear favourites in Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Unbelievable) and Elliot Page (Juno, The Umbrella Academy). If you squint, Dever somewhat resembles 19-year-old Ellie from the second game (The Last of Us Part 2), but definitely not her 13-year-old likeness. Ellie and Elliot Page on the other hand, have history…
In the year or so leading up to the release of The Last of Us, Naughty Dog dropped posters and trailers that you’d be forgiven for thinking actually featured Elliot Page as Ellie. Page was in fact starring in another game, Beyond: Two Souls, which came out the same year, and even called out Naughty Dog for seemingly ‘ripping off’ their likeness.
When The Last of Us was released, Ellie’s likeness seemed to have moved away from Page’s. With Naughty Dog explaining they’d revised her look to incorporate more elements of the actor who had actually portrayed her, Ashley Johnson — and stated that any resemblance to Page was a “complete coincidence”.
Regardless of the clear facial similarities, Page, who is currently 33, is now 20 years older than the Ellie we meet at the start of the first game. Ramsey may be 17 but she can certainly play younger more convincingly than most of these supposed alternatives. Meanwhile the ‘Joels’ find themselves on the wrong side of 50. Joel is meant to be in his mid-to-late 40s, so is much closer in age to the 45-year-old Pedro Pascal than 52-year-old Hugh Jackman.
There is one final lookalike worth taking a look at — also my personal favourite — Josh Holloway. While recently starring in NBC’s sci-fi drama Colony, he’s still best known as Sawyer from Lost. Many have noticed that (as Sawyer) Holloway strikes an uncanny resemblance to another Last of Us character: Tommy (Joel’s brother). Meanwhile, others have noted that (as Will from Colony) Holloway in fact closely resembles Joel — especially in the context of the show’s dystopian setting.
But it’s nothing more than a hairstyle that distinguishes these two likenesses. Sawyer, like Tommy, has long, blonde-ish hair. While Will, like Joel, has shorter, darker hair — all have beards and broody dispositions, incidentally.
Across all these examples, whatever one might think of resemblances to video game characters, what’s crucial to remember is that resemblance is not a casting director’s main consideration — whether in shortlisting, auditioning, or offering roles. This much, at least, is evident in HBO’s casting decisions since Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, as many fairly point out, don’t look like Naughty Dog’s Joel and Ellie. But the decision is also endorsed by the game’s creative director Neil Druckmann, who is co-writing this TV adaptation (with Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin).
That’s not to say a resemblance is never a consideration in casting any adaptaion. Indeed, when bringing real-life figures to the screen, most casting choices still rarely land too far from at least some recognisable, shared physical characteristics. This being exemplified by the ever-evolving casting of the Royal Family and various global figures in The Crown. But in video game adaptations, the casting of iconic characters has seen an interesting range of choices that seems to fall into one of two categories — faithful or sacrilegious.
Lara Croft, a true icon of video games since the mid-1990s, has seen two different actors play her in very different adaptations. First was Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life (2003). And while it’s easy to associate her with Lara Croft now, at the time director Simon West struggled to convince the studio, and the fans, that she was right for Lara despite apparently lacking a close resemblance. This despite the fact that video game graphics were still in their relative infancy, so filmmakers and fans needn’t have been beholden to the kinds of expectations now generated by the detailed, photo-realistic character likenesses games in like The Last of Us. At the time of Jolie’s first outing, in-game Lara Croft was still very polygonal and practically cartoon-like in appearance — her most recognisable feature being an absurdly unrealistic figure.
So while the studio was pushing for a star with a more clean-cut public image than Jolie’s (totally overlooking her recent Academy Award win), there were also some fans not happy with the idea of a screen Lara Croft that didn’t match (the preposterous) physical proportions of video game Lara Croft. Jolie even had to contend with being challenged by journalists about whether she was in fact ‘busty’ enough for the role. Despite her personal struggle to carry the weight of expectations, and whatever one thinks of the films themselves, Jolie undoubtedly owned her performance as Lara Croft.
In 2013, the same year The Last of Us came out, the Tomb Raider video game franchise was completely rebooted with the release of the simply titled Tomb Raider. Lara Croft was reintroduced as a younger, more inexperienced Tomb Raider, and any sexualised elements of her appearance were conspicuously binned. The game featured a grittier storyline and focused on intense, survival-based gameplay. The experience encouraged the player to forge a kind of emotional connection to Lara Croft that had not been previously asked of them.
Along with games like The Last of Us, Tomb Raider was part of a growing trend in the action-adventure genre. Such games now featured more weighty stories and complex characters that demanded a level of ongoing emotional investment hitherto unseen outside of ‘prestige’ box-set dramas. So when another screen adaptation was announced — Tomb Raider (2018) — again starring a recent Oscar-winner, Alicia Vikander, it seemed like a slam dunk. Sadly, the wait for that most elusive movie curiosity — a (really) good video game adaptation — goes on.
While Vikander certainly proved a great choice to embody a younger and more grounded version of Lara Croft, the film, based heavily on the plot of the 2013 game, was far too unimaginative in its adaptation — and replicated entire sequences, beat-for-beat. But whereas being in control of Lara in the game means you feel the thud of every fall and the crunch of your axe in a bad guy’s skull, watching this slavishly recreated in live-action was tedious, especially if you’re familiar with the in-game moments the action is drawing from.
This does nothing to aid Vikander’s cause in an otherwise committed and physically demanding performance. Despite the underwhelming reaction, Tomb Raider made nearly $300M and a sequel is now on the way with Vikander returning. But with production having been postponed indefinitely due to the pandemic, it may be some time before Vikander has another chance to stamp her identity on the character the same way Angelina Jolie did.
The two Lara Crofts serve as an interesting lesson to the makers and fans of game-to-screen adaptations. Jolie succeeded in creating her own distinct screen version of an already iconic game character, despite being seen as ‘bad casting’ by some fans and even the studio behind the film. Vikander on the other hand, was generally seen by most as “good casting”. But, through no fault of her own, she didn’t see her adaptation match, or indeed surpass, the cultural impact of its source material. Whether we’re talking about casting or an adaptation at large, it’s fair to say that a good lookalike does not, necessarily, a good adaptation make.
Ultimately, different filmmakers and their casting directors will have different priorities, and all are required to juggle any ‘dream’ preferences with factors like age, availability and on-screen chemistry. Via their initial casting choices, the team behind The Last of Us seem to be indicating an appreciation that, in order for an adaptation to succeed, it must do so on its own terms. And this requires them to, at least to some extent, move the show away from feeling too much like the game — whether in its locations, story arcs or character choices. Otherwise, what would be the point of adapting it in the first place?
The Last of Us, and its sequel, are two of the most awarded video games ever, and two of the best-selling. But history is littered with the corpses of bad video game adaptations — zombified corpses in the case of the Resident Evil movies. This tension will only heighten the anticipation as we wait to see how HBO can bring Naughty Dog’s vision of a post-pandemic world to life on screen.
As for Joel and Ellie, what to make of the fact that we’ll have to learn to love these new versions? What will it be like to divorce ourselves from the originals, to whom we feel so much attachment? All I can say is, take heart from Harry Potter. They may not have cast the geeky kid from My Family, but those films still turned out alright.
