We turn now to the two things that the internet gets the most loudly passionate about: Catherine O’Hara and HBO’s live-action adaptation of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us.
O’Hara, star of Schitt’s Creek, Beetlejuice, and that thing at Disney World where you learn about the chief exports of Ottawa, has become the closest thing there is to a living saint in the world of television comedy. This made it especially exciting when, during the opening volley of February 2024, word came down that the Home Alone star was in the running for a role on The Last of Us. Not long after, Variety confirmed that O’Hara would be appearing on their post-apocalyptic awards sponge, enigmatically listing her role as “undisclosed.”
Who could Catherine O’Hara play in season two of The Last of Us?
Luckily, The Last of Us pulls from some pretty specific source material, and internet sleuths and fans of the games have already put together a collective list of possible roles that O’Hara could be playing.
The first option is a dark horse candidate. Scuttlebutt on movie Twitter points to O’Hara playing an original character created just for the show – someone called Gail. Suspicious, to the point of feeling an awful lot like that time when the studio kept telling us that Benedict Cumberbatch was definitely playing an original character and not Khan in Star Trek: Into Darkness? A little.
Because there are big, important characters from the games that O’Hara could be playing. CinemaBlend points out that she’d be a shoo-in for an in-person version of the leader of the Seraphites, some of the bad guys in The Last of Us Part II. Not seen in person in the games, the Seraphite leader would, technically, be an “original character” since the showrunners would be able to interpret her however they want. The same piece hypothesizes that O’Hara could be a more fleshed-out version of Lev and Yara’s mom, who mostly serves as a short-lived distributor of guilt and horror in the games.
That said, real fans of Catherine O’Hara will have no doubt immediately recognized that it’s ridiculous to speculate about this sort of thing and that there’s really only one potential addition to the Last of Us universe worth bringing the beloved performer into the fold.
That’s right: Doctor Clara Mandrake in the Crows Have Eyes/The Last of Us crossover that you never knew you needed. The Crows Have Eyes 4: The Crows Have Spores. We’re like, 98% positive about this one.