The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey has a simple message for people who can’t stop doomscrolling their way through the HBO juggernaut: don’t watch.
And honestly, it’s not the worst advice after all the backlash to (spoiler alert) Pedro Pascal’s Joel Miller meeting a golf-club-to-the-head end in Season 2, courtesy of Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever.
Appearing on Entertainment Weekly’s The Awardist podcast earlier this month, Ramsey cut through the noise with the bluntness of someone who’s clearly over it:
“You don’t have to watch. If you hate it that much, the game exists. You can just play the game again. If you do want to watch it, hope you enjoy it.”
Somewhere in an HBO boardroom, you just know an executive is clutching a stress ball shaped like Pedro Pascal’s face.
While the series tweaked some details of Joel’s demise, gamers knew it was coming—it plays out almost the same in The Last of Us Part II. The only real shock was for viewers who thought HBO would bend the narrative to keep Pascal’s jawline around forever.
Season 1 had unified Pascal’s growing stardom with PlayStation diehards, but Season 2 splintered that harmony into think pieces, review-bombs, and the usual chorus of bad-faith trolling.
Ramsey, who uses they/them pronouns, has found themselves squarely in the middle of that discourse simply for existing as Ellie. They’ve embodied the role since Season 1: a teenager immune to the cordyceps infection and humanity’s best shot at survival.
But Ramsey isn’t here for the noise:
“There’s nothing I can do about it anyway. The show is out. There’s nothing that can be changed or altered. So I’m like, there’s not really any point in reading or looking at anything.”
You can listen to the full podcast here.
And that detachment is probably healthy. Like the first half of the video game’s Part II, Season 2 ends on a cliffhanger with a gun-wielding Abby ambushing Ellie. Season 3 is expected to shift the focus to Dever’s Abby, while Ellie begins her bloody Seattle revenge mission with girlfriend Dina.
Pascal, for his part, is still grieving like the rest of us:
“I'm in active denial. I realize this more and more as I get older, I find myself slipping into denial that anything is over."
"I know that I'm forever bonded to so many members of the experience and just have to see them under different circumstances, but never will under the circumstances of playing Joel on The Last of Us. And, no, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it because it makes me sad.”
Swoon. Cue collective heart eyes for the internet’s favorite sad dad.
Not that HBO seems worried. The Last of Us was renewed for a third season in April and has already bagged Emmy nominations for Ramsey, Pascal, and the show itself. Not bad for a series half the internet insists they’re hate-watching.
The internet wasted no time reacting, with many fans cheering Ramsey’s no-nonsense honesty while others doubled down on their usual complaints that the game was just as bad as Season 2.Outside the post-apocalypse, Ramsey is keeping busy. They’ll next star opposite Daisy Haggard in a six-part series as Maya, a woman trying to outrun the trauma of her past while dodging two persistent hitmen.
So, haters, take note: the infected aren’t the only ones who refuse to die off.
