Bella Ramsey was already a well-known name in the entertainment industry thanks to their role in Game of Thrones, but the overwhelming success of The Last of Us helped them attain a completely new level of fame and prominence. Lyanna Mormont was a side character. Ellie Williams is a main protagonist. And Ramsey now understands the difference between the two all too well.
It wouldn’t have been easy approaching such a revered character and not feeling at least a smidgen of dread about messing it up. Video games, after all, have a nasty reputation in live-action form, and it wasn’t until a while ago when Netflix’s Arcane indisputably broke the so-called “video game curse” that people started to really give these adaptations a chance.
Bella Ramsey fortunately didn’t share those anxieties because they weren’t a gamer growing up. In fact, as they explained it to Vanity Fair, it was only through clickbait that they learned about The Last of Us in the first place.
“Though I quickly learned the impact [The Last of Us] had, I’d heard of it because I saw a clickbait thing talking about it being the first lesbian kiss in a video game. I thought, Oh, that’s cool.”
Well, I guess that’s one function of the clickbait we never thought about.
Ramsey is probably thinking about Ellie and Riley’s kiss in The Last of Us downloadable content, Left Behind. But as fans would tell you, that’s only the foundation that the franchise builds upon in terms of representation, with The Last of Us Part II fully depicting an LGBT relationship through its long narrative.
Indeed, when we see Ellie next, she’ll have been living alongside the rest of the Jackson community for a few years, thus setting the stage for the proper introduction of Dina, the girl we but glimpsed in season 1.