HBO’s The Last of Us has gripped audiences every Sunday night for the last couple of months, following the fraught journey of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a post-apocalyptic landscape, with more than a couple of heartbreaking detours. And the season finale was no different.
The ninth and final episode of Season 1, entitled “Look for the Light,” introduces viewers to a new character via flashback: Anna, Ellie’s mother, who died shortly after giving birth to her. And in a full circle moment that will be deeply satisfying to fans of the video game on which the show is based, Anna is portrayed in the screen adaptation by actress Ashley Johnson, who provided the original voice of Ellie in the game.
Anna never actually appears in the games, and very little information is revealed about her other than that she was a friend of Marlene, and she left Ellie a note and her trusty switchblade. In a recent interview, game creator Neil Druckmann explained how he and showrunner Craig Mazin decided to diverge from the game narrative—not for the first time this season—in order to tell a slightly different version of that story.
“There are other stories that were written since the game had come out for different projects that, for one reason or another, didn’t happen that when Craig and I started talking about the story and breaking it down, I mentioned some of those to him, and he was wide-eyed like a fan and said, ‘Oh my God, we got to put these on the screen, we’ve got to get them on the show,'” he said. “Ashley Johnson plays Ellie’s mom, and that was one of those stories that were near and dear to my heart, and I’m so glad that it gets to live.”
Johnson, who also currently voices the character of Pike in Amazon Prime’s The Legend of Vox Machina, is the latest actor from the games to appear in The Last of Us, after the pilot episode’s version of Marlene was played by Merle Dandridge, who voiced the same character in Parts 1 and 2 of the game, and Troy Baker, the voice of Joel, showed up in Episode 8 as James.
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
