The Last of Us Star Bella Ramsey Talks Comparisons to Video Game Ellie

Bella Ramsey blew critics and their co-stars away with their performance as Ellie in The Last of Us. But at the same time, they’ve had to fight criticism and sometimes outright trolling from people who think Ramsey doesn’t look enough like the Ellie of the games.

It’s something Ramsey was well aware of while undergoing training for The Last of Us Season 2, where they take over as the main character after the murder of her father figure Joel. They trained in boxing, martial arts and weights in order to meet the physical challenges Ellie is forced to handle. And it had an effect on them they didn’t expect.

“It was cool to feel really… capable,” Ramsey told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I got quite fixated on the way that Ellie looks in the game and her physical stature and, to be specific, the muscle definition in her arms. And I didn’t look like that. My body type isn’t that.”

Luckily, they had Craig Mazin, co-creator of The Last of Us, on hand to help them. “I talked about this a lot with Craig, and he never put that expectation on me. He wanted me to look strong and feel strong, and that was in how I carried myself, my posture and the confidence you have. It was a challenge for me to let myself off the hook for not looking computer-generated,” Ramsey said.

Unfortunately, though, some people were obsessed with Ramsey’s Ellie not looking like the computer-generated one, and took to social media to tell them so and spread cruel memes. Luckily, Ramsey had deleted their social media accounts by then. “I always knew that I’d [deactivate] it one day and never even really wanted to have social media in the first place,” they told the Hollywood Reporter. “It wasn’t like this big dramatic thing, but there was an element of it that was thinking about the show coming out for Season 2. If I just avoid Twitter and Reddit, which now I’m doing, then everything’s totally fine.”

Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby Also Doesn’t Look Like Her Game Counterpart

Ramsey isn’t the only one playing a character who looks different from their game version. Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby also looks different, as she doesn’t have the muscles that game Abby has. Co-creator Neil Druckmann spoke about that aspect of casting to Entertainment Weekly in February.

“We would’ve struggled to find someone as good as Kaitlyn to play this role,” he said. “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.”

Druckmann also said, “We need someone to really capture the essence of those characters…. We don’t value as much, ‘Do they look exactly like the character with their eyebrows or their nose or their body?’ Whatever it is. It’s not nowhere on the priority list, but it’s below a bunch of other things that we consider.” That’s something the trolls might want to think about before attacking Ramsey over their looks.

The Last of Us is streaming on Max.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly