HBO Max’s adaptation of The Last of Us video game has cast the character of Riley, giving a new glimpse into their plans for the TV show’s story. The Last of Us TV season 1 is set to be a relatively faithful adaptation of the original video game. This is confirmed to some extent by the involvement of Neil Druckmann, the creative director behind the video game franchise. However, the casting decisions around Riley actually provide further insight into what fans might be able to expect from the narrative.

The first The Last of Us video game follows Joel (Pedro Pascal, Troy Baker in the games) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey, Ashley Johnson in the games) as they struggle to make their way across the United States 20 years after a terrible outbreak. The cordyceps infection acts in a similar way to many sci-fi zombie diseases, transferred either by bites or through spores and causing the victim to mutate and become dangerous to all around them. In the video games, Ellie is the only known human to be immune to the infection, a discovery that came at the cost of her friend, Riley Abel (Yaani King in the games).

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HBO Max has cast Storm Reid, known for her roles as Gia Bennett in Euphoria, and Meg in A Wrinkle in Time as Riley in The Last of Us. Riley does not appear in the main game but makes appearances in the prequel DLC, The Last of Us: Left Behind, and the graphic novel, The Last of Us: American Dreams. This means that her casting heavily signals that the HBO Max adaptation will go outside of just the main storyline for the original game and will include full scenes, presumably as flashbacks, that detail the events before the main plot. This makes a lot of sense for the TV series as the story, particularly in The Last of Us: Left Behind, serves largely as an origin story for Ellie, giving the character more depth in preparation for her even larger role in The Last of Us Part II.

riley and ellie in last of us 2

Riley was a close friend of Ellie’s when she lived inside the Boston Quarantine Zone, where the events of the main The Last of Us game begin. In The Last of Us: American Dreams, their growing friendship is demonstrated with their dangerous excursions which help to illustrate the fatalism that Ellie has grown up around. This is hammered home by The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC in which Ellie and Riley break out after curfew and go to an abandoned mall. After entertaining themselves for some time, the two share their first kiss shortly before a horde of infected break in on them. While they escape being killed, they are both bitten in the process. The two decide to stay together and wait for the infection to take hold while the sun rises, but Ellie discovers that she is immune and never turns, leaving her with a grim outlook and some survivor’s guilt over Riley’s death.

Filming for HBO Max’s The Last of Us TV adaptation has been a long process, but it seems odd that the casting for Riley has come so relatively late in the process. This most likely suggests that the flashbacks or prequel sequences are merely being filmed late in production despite being established grounding for what comes later. However, it could potentially hint at a larger change to the original narrative with Riley somehow having survived the encounter at the mall. This would help to move the franchise away from its habit of leaving LGBTQ+ characters with unhappy endings; however, it would be a very major change from The Last of Us’ original narrative and characterization that would likely be divisive among fans.

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