Prepare for more of those clicker sounds bouncing around your brain. After setting HBO viewership records during its premiere in early 2023, zombie apocalypse thriller The Last of Us is headed for a second season, bringing Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal back as emotionally traumatized psuedo-father-daughter duo Ellie and Joel. And now that the series has multiple Emmy nominations under its belt, expect an even splashier season 2.
The HBO adaptation was the media giant’s second largest debut, falling only behind Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon in viewership, and having experienced a 22 percent audience jump from its first episode to its second. (That’s the biggest increase for an HBO original drama in history.) Suffice to say folks were and remain invested in the adaptation of the PlayStation series, which itself has sold millions of copies across two games.
Upon HBO’s greenlighting season 2, executive producer and show co-creator Craig Mazin released the following statement: “I’m so grateful to [co-creator and original game developer] Neil Druckmann and HBO for our partnership, and I’m even more grateful to the millions of people who have joined us on this journey. The audience has given us the chance to continue, and as a fan of the characters and world Neil and Naughty Dog created, I couldn’t be more ready to dive back in.”
Throughout its nine episodes, season 1 remained largely faithful to the 2013 game, even re-creating some scenes essentially image for image. But season 2 is more of an enigma, given the source material upon which it’s based: The Last of Us Part II, the sequel set several years after the events of Part I. After bringing the video game’s controversial (and, to be fair, beloved) cliffhanger ending to the screen in the season 1 finale, the showrunners are jumping into the fray on season 2. Here’s what we know so far.
Mazin has made his intentions clear: He wants to adapt Part II, and he wants to do it with Ramsey as Ellie. In an interview with ELLE.com in January, he said, “To get to the end of the story in the time that we need to take to get to the proper end would be awesome. If I got to work on a set with Bella Ramsey every day for the rest of my life, I’d be thrilled.”
Ramsey is also eager to return to the role, telling ELLE.com, “There’s no limits for me. They can do as many games as they like, as many series as they like, and I’ll be here, flying back out to Canada.”
But what exactly that means for season 2 is only just now becoming clear. Part II of the video game series takes a multi-year time jump, introducing fans to Ellie at the age of 19. (She was 14 in Part I.) The story follows the now-adult Ellie as she hunts down a stranger known as Abby, and follows her and her faction across the country to the ruined outskirts of Seattle. The game is viscerally violent, even more so than Part I, though that’s not the only potential issue impacting a sophomore season of the HBO series.
What we do know is that the next season won’t be able to cover the entirety of Part II. When asked how the second game would be adapted for TV, Druckman coyly replied to GQ, “It’s more than one season.” He didn’t share more after that. “You have noted correctly that we will not say how many,” Mazin jokingly added. “But more than one is factually correct.”
Season 2 will indeed “be different” from Part II, Mazin told Entertainment Weekly in a post-season 1 finale interview, “just as this season was different [from the first game]. Sometimes it will be different radically, and sometimes it will be [barely] different at all. But it’s going to be different and it will be its own thing. It won’t be exactly like the game.”
Other questions abound, most of them in the spoiler territory (so I’ll keep my speculating vague). Fans found multiple major plot developments in Part II difficult to watch, and transferring those scenes to the screen could prove a particular challenge for Mazin and Druckmann. There’s also an essential perspective shift that takes place midway through Part II, one that forces the player’s empathy to realign with a different character. Replicating that same impact in a live-action adaptation will be tricky, though not impossible, to perfect.
Rest assured, though: Mazin and Druckmann understand the themes they’re working with. As the latter told Deadline, the second season will be “a continuation of love from the first season, and this is just the dark side of that coin, the pursuit of justice at any cost for the ones you love and the exploration of that.”
Mazin and Druckmann have revealed, in an interview with Deadline, that season 2 will consist of seven episodes. A potential third season to follow would be “significantly larger.”
“The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons,” Mazin said. “When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, [for season 2], the natural breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes.”
However, there will be at least one supersized episode in the sophomore season. As Mazin put it, this episode will be “quite big,” if not necessarily “feature length.” Still, he continued, “What we don’t want to do is, say a season of seven episodes where each episode is 90 minutes; part of why we’re doing seven episodes is finding that nice line.”
Mazin and Druckmann anticipate at least three seasons, but potentially four.
“We don’t think that we’re going to be able to tell the story even within two seasons [2 and 3] because we’re taking our time and go down interesting pathways which we did a little bit in season 1, too,” Mazin told Deadline. “Season 3 will be significantly larger. And indeed, the story may require season 4.”
On the Happy Sad Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz in February 2023, Ramsey first confirmed that the show would take a time jump between seasons 1 and 2—and that she’d be a part of the production. She shared that she will “be 20, probably” by the time season 2 begins production, “and I’ll be playing 19. So yeah, I will be closer to my age.”
In a post-season 1 finale interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mazin batted away any ideas of recasting Ellie, and teased a more mature look for Ramsey. “We know what we’re gonna do in terms of costume and makeup and hair, but more importantly, we also know the spirit and soul of the actor,” he said.
Ramsey and Pascal, then, will return to their roles—with a few important additions alongside them, including Dopesick actress Kaitlyn Dever as Ellie’s adversary, Abby; Beef’s Young Mazino as her friend Jesse; and Isabela Merced (Transformers: The Last Knight) as Ellie’s romantic interest, Dina. Upon Merced’s casting announcement, Druckmann and Mazin shared a statement: “Dina is warm, brilliant, wild, funny, moral, dangerous and instantly lovable. You can search forever for an actor who effortlessly embodies all of those things, or you can find Isabela Merced right away.”
Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced in 2023.
Other additional castings include Catherine O’Hara in an undisclosed role, Jeffrey Wright as Isaac (whom he played in the video game), Danny Ramirez (Top Gun: Maverick) as Manny, Ariela Barer (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) as Mel, Tati Gabrielle (You) as Nora, and Spencer Lord (Riverdale) as Owen, according to Variety.
Plus, a few talented stunt performers and extras will get the chance to embody clickers once again: Mazin teased during a press conference that “it’s quite possible that there will be a lot more infected later” in season 2. “And perhaps different kinds.”
In the meantime, avoid searching out other potential cast lists unless you want to endure a lot of spoilers.
During an HBO and Max presentation on November 2, 2023, HBO CEO Casey Bloys first shared that season 2 would begin production in spring 2024, with plans to premiere in 2025. In December, the network confirmed a 2025 release in a sizzle reel of upcoming titles.
While HBO hasn’t shared an official trailer just yet, the network did share first-look photos of Pascal and Ramsey in the roles in May 2024.
HBO later teased the new season (and doubled down on the 2025 release date) with a sizzle reel that aired on August 4. Fast forward to around 1:17 in the clip below.
This story will be updated.
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.
