Luna, who will portray the brother of protagonist Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), touched on the series' release date in an interview with, teasing, "I'm not in the scheduling department, but it'd be sooner than later."
The network previously stated that the series is expected to launch sometime in 2022, but based on a hint from Luna, it may arrive earlier in the year than previously believed. While The Last of Us is one of the most highly anticipated video game adaptations of all time, the series has yet to receive an official release window from HBO. “I’ve met teenagers who played the first game and Left Behind and said that it helped them feel comfortable coming out… It’s gone so far past just being a game for me.HBO's small-screen adaptation of The Last of Usmay release sooner than expected, according to Gabriel Luna, the actor playing Tommy Miller in the first season of the upcoming series. “I’m an incredibly private person, but when I do get to talk with people about this game, especially fans who are younger and figuring themselves out, I am oftentimes just reduced to a puddle ,” says Johnson. And just as with film and TV, it is especially meaningful for young people to see themselves represented on-screen.
Queer characters and stories are starting to take centre stage in games: later this year, French studio Dontnod’s Tell Me Why will become the first game with a trans main character. We have seen more female characters, more racial diversity, and an explosion of stories about relationships and identity, from the supernatural teen drama Life Is Strange to millennial disaffection soap opera Night in the Woods. Since 2013, when Johnson first played Ellie, representation has come a long way in games. “I think it’s so beautiful and fun, wholesome and sexy.” “I love how Ellie and Dina’s relationship is depicted in this game,” says Johnson. But it’s not an unremittingly grim experience there are moments of intimacy and levity that lift the mood, particularly the scenes between Ellie and her girlfriend, who at one point end up hooking up in an abandoned underground cannabis farm. Ellie gets drawn into a horrible cycle of retribution that takes her and the player to some extremely dark places, and Ashley says that much of it was really hard to shoot. The Last of Us Part II is an extremely heavy game. Hopefully, after this game people will stop asking that question.” She always has been and there was never any doubt about it. “Whenever I’ve met fans at there are still some people who ask: ‘Ellie’s not gay, right? She was just experimenting, right?’” laughs Johnson. Photograph: Naughty DogĪmusingly, despite a pretty unambiguous kiss at the end of Left Behind, some players were reluctant to accept Ellie’s sexuality. It was time I’d ever played from the perspective of a teen girl, and the first time I’d ever seen the intense, funny and sometimes confusing dynamics of female best friendship given any airtime in a game.Ī young Ellie, right, with Riley in The Last of Us: Left Behind.
It is a heartfelt and heartbreaking vignette of first love at the end of the world, following the girls on an irresistibly dangerous jaunt through a long-abandoned mall that, unfortunately, turns out not to be free of the infected. That changed with 2014’s The Last of Us: Left Behind, a short companion game that took players back to Ellie’s first romance with her teenage best pal Riley. In 2013’s The Last of Us, Ellie was a supporting character: the funny, sarcastic teenage foil to gruff, conflicted, beardy father figure Joel, who transported her across America on a post-apocalyptic road trip. Despite a history of gay representation that goes back decades – gay marriage was a thing in The Sims long before most real-world countries – games rarely have much to say about what it’s like to be queer in real life. Often your choice of romantic partner feels hardly more consequential than your choice of favourite weapon.
Your romantic choices never affect how a character moves through the world or how others react to them. But often there isn’t much weight to this version of in-game queerness. Role-playing games have long featured romance, and some developers pride themselves on offering players unrestricted choice in BioWare’s 2011 fantasy game Dragon Age 2, characters of all genders are “player-sexual” and will happily reciprocate if you hit on them. Most often in video games, if a character is gay it’s because you chose for them to be so.