The Last of Us season two: Kaitlyn Dever on playing divisive antagonist Abby

When The Last of Us video game was released in 2013, it was immediately apparent that this was different.

There have been plenty of games with compelling narrative arcs but there was something about The Last of Us that felt, well, cinematic. There was smart game play but it was the story scenes in between that captured the hearts of gamers and even those who just sat down to watch.

It was the tale of middle-aged Joel and young girl Ellie, a de-facto father-and-daughter pairing as they fought to survive in a dangerous post-apocalyptic world. Ellie is immune to the fungus-based virus that turns humans into cordyceps zombies called Clickers, and in the first game, Joel was to help deliver her to a group of scientists hoping to develop a vaccine.

There were missions and perils, but the depth of their relationship is what made it distinct. That it would be adapted for a movie or TV series was a no-brainer, and the resulting show, the 2023 HBO drama The Last of Us was a resounding success with critics, audiences and those original gaming fans.

The series returns for its second season next week, but it’s not as straightforward as the game-to-screen journey of its first instalment.

Game co-creator Neil Druckmann and the team at Naughty Dog released a sequel game in June 2020, at the height of stir-crazy pandemic lockdowns. It was eagerly anticipated, and for most fans, another masterpiece.

The story continued, the world got bigger, there were emotional gut-punches and riveting action set-pieces. New characters joined and enriched the narrative.

But not everyone agreed. Like many fervent fandoms, the gamer community had its toxic elements.

What that brood decided was they really, really, really hated a new character introduced in The Last of Us Part II, Abby. Originally positioned as an antagonist to Ellie and Joel, Abby was the daughter of a doctor Joel killed at the end of part one.

She was on a revenge mission, and in a twist, about a quarter of the way through the gameplay, it switched to Abby’s point-of-view so that players was forced to play as her, and sometimes that meant attacking Ellie. It was bold but it was smart, and it signalled the game’s intentions in exploring empathy and perspective in an environment that could easily be binary.

It really set some people off, who were offended by the character and her physicality, as well as Ellie’s queerness as she matured.

Druckmann and writer Halley Gross, as well as the voice and motion-capture actor who portrayed Abby for the game, received hate mail and many death threats. The disproportionate reaction would be extraordinary if it wasn’t also despairingly typical of toxic fandoms.

Kaitlyn Dever has been cast to play Abby in the second season of The Last of US TV adaptation, which returns to screens on Monday.

The American actor was aware of the hoopla, even at the time because she had actually been in conversation with Druckmann and series co-creator Craig Mazin about a potential film adaptation.

Abby comes with so much baggage but Dever was never intimidated by it.

“I definitely didn’t want to ignore it, and it’s hard to ignore on the internet,” she told The Nightly. “I’m looking at it and reading all the stuff. I was aware of it in my first meeting with Craig and Neil, we talked a little about it, and it didn’t scare me.

“It also wouldn’t have stopped me from playing her just because I loved the idea of playing this woman. I was just so excited to get to do that.

“I put all of what I knew was going on online, I put all of that into a box to the side. I wasn’t ignoring it, I wanted to be aware of it, but I also had to block it out a little bit when I was creating this character and doing the actual work, because I knew that a duty.”

Dever emphasised that she cares what the fans think and hope they like her take on Abby, but she knows she can’t control what may or may not come once the character makes her debut.

She had been a fan of the game from the start. Dever is a self-confessed bad player — “I was generally just bad at aiming” — and only got halfway through the second game, which is, admittedly, incredibly long, and also because Druckmann and Mazin had told her to not focus on it so much.

But she shares her love of The Last of Us with her dad, and had ploughed through the 2013 release with him.

“It was a real bonding moment for the two of us,” she said. “He’s a big gamer in general and I would never play games with him, but when this came out, I was blown away by the scenes that would play throughout. They were just so beautiful.

“Now, getting to share the work and share all of this stuff with him, and get to send him pictures from set, and have him visit the set was so exciting for him. That’s the best part of my job, getting to share it with my family, and he’s so excited about it all.”

Dever’s father isn’t the only one. Gabriel Luna, who plays Tommy, the brother to Pedro Pascal’s Joel, is one of the actors returning to the second season. He said he’s particularly pumped for fans to see how the gaming mechanics have been incorporated into the new episodes.

“It’s all in the show, but it’s never super obvious, and I like that element of it.”

Luna said the new cast members, which includes Isabela Merced (Sicario: Day of the Soldado) and Young Mazino (Beef), whose characters Dina and Jesse enter into a type of love triangle with Ellie (Bella Ramsey), all came on set super prepared, and as a “set rat” who “never leaves” he got to see everyone’s performances.

“Love triangle” might be alarming to anyone wary of soap opera-esque drama in a series that leans the other way, but Merced said, “Technically it’s a love triangle but it’s really grounded, and you don’t feel the traditional resentment in the love triangle. It’s much deeper than that.”

Mazino posited, “In the post-apocalyptic environment, life and death is binary. In this world, one wrong move and it ends. As a result, people tend to cherish connection to one another in a deeper sense that maybe goes beyond or transcends your typical romance and desire.”

Those character beats in even the supporting characters speak to the richness of The Last of Us. In TV form, it’s been able to fulfil even more of its ambitions to always balance the plot propulsion of a dystopian action story with character moments.

It used to be the Joel and Ellie show, but with the addition of Abby and the others, The Last of Us has expanded its world.

The Last of Us season two starts streaming on Max on Monday, April 14