Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey Cast in ‘The Last Of Us’ HBO Series

It’s finally happening. We finally know our Joel and Ellie for the upcoming series adaptation of The Last of Us. And, wow, did HBO do a great job. Pedro Pascal has been officially cast as the haunted lone wolf Joel and Bella Ramsey is set to play our joke-loving Ellie.

It’s hard to overstate how excellent this casting is. Capturing Troy Baker’s grumbling depiction of Joel was always going to require a delicate hand. At his core, Joel is a man in mourning. He’s a father who lost his daughter to a plague that kills without discretion. While wallowing in this sorrow and tidal waves of survivor’s guilt, he somehow manages to survive in a world torn by a zombie apocalypse. Yet when The Last of Us begins that’s the only thing Joel can do: survive. It’s not until he meets Ellie, a talkative preteen girl whose immunity may be humanity’s only hope at a cure, that he finally returns to the land of the living.

That’s what the role of Joel requires. Whoever plays him has to capture what it’s like to emerge from a daze and feel the full crushing weight of losing a child. They have to balance this devastation with Joel’s defensive dismissiveness of Ellie, the begrudging love that develops as he steps into his role as her surrogate father, his bone-chilling sense of loyalty, and Joel’s fondness for making dad jokes while everything around him is literally crumbling. That’s a lot to balance at once, and Pedro Pascal is exactly the person who can do it.

Thanks to his role in The Mandalorian, we already know Pascal makes a great surrogate daddy (as well as a regular daddy — the man is smoking). But it’s his work in Narcos that proves Pascal is a perfect fit for the role of Joel. Pascal’s under-appreciated take on DEA Agent Javier Peña is that of a man trapped between what’s correct and what’s right. Agent Peña knows that the safest way to stop the Medellín and Cali Cartels is by listening to his supervisors and following the system. He also knows that the legal way is exhaustingly slow and that every day he spends letting these cartel leaders run free is another day innocent people are being killed. Much of Narcos is devoted to watching Agent Peña drift away from the tried and true path to follow his own gut and morals, even though the latter involves him going undercover into the very cartels he’s vowed to destroy. Without giving too much away, that battle between what’s correct and what’s right is what defines Joel by the end of the first game.

Then you have Bella Ramsey tackling the equally complicated role of Ellie. If Joel is a simmering stew of emotions, then Ellie is a something more deceptive. She presents herself as a fun-loving normal kid. Some of the all-time best moments of the first The Last of Us happen when Ellie shares another corny joke or when she stares in wonderment after finding some freed giraffes. That happy-go-lucky persona is something Ramsey has demonstrated through her voice-acting work as the titular star of Netflix’s Hilda. But there’s a deep well of sadness to Ellie’s smile. Underneath her laughter and adolescent rebellions is a kid who’s watched her parents, family, friends, and first love perish around her. Yet, like Joel, she’s still there to survive another day. We’ve seen Ramsey demonstrate that depth as well, first on Game of Thrones as Lyanna Mormont and most recently on His Dark Materials as Angelica.

Basically, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey check every single box when it comes to playing a good Joel and Ellie. And with an incredible showrunner like Craig Maizen in the driver’s seat and Neil Druckmann on board, this new series is looking better by the second. We still don’t know when this new take on a beloved video game will premiere, but we’re ready for it.