With HBO and PlayStation Production set to begin filming their television adaptation of the hit PlayStation video game The Last of Us in July, the series has added another member to its cast.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Merle Dandridge, who originally played Marlene in The Last of Us video game series, has now signed on to reprise the character once again for the HBO series. For anyone who hasn’t played the game series, Marlene is the leader of the resistance group, the Fireflies, as well as being the character who initiates the plot as she is the one who asks Joel to smuggle Ellie across the United States.
Dandridge, so far, is the only actor from the game series to reprise their role for the TV series as Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) have been cast as Joel and Ellie respectively with Gabriel Luna set to play Joel’s brother, Tommy. The series will be directed by Jasmila Žbanić, Ali Abbasi, and Kantemir Balagov from a script by Craig Mazin, the creator of HBO’s acclaimed limited series Chernobyl, and Neil Druckmann, the writer and creative director of the game series.
The Last of Us is “set 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed and centres on the relationship between Joel, a smuggler in this new world, and Ellie, a teenager who may be key to a cure for a deadly pandemic. Joel, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle the 14-year-old girl out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey as they traverse the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.”
