How The Last of Us season two will deal with Ellie’s age jump: ‘No House of the Dragon leaps’

The Last of Us creator Craig Mazin has addressed how the five year time jump between season one and two of the series will impact Bella Ramsey’s casting as Ellie.

The second series of the post-apocalyptic drama is expected to cover the events of the original 2013 game’s 2020 sequel, The Last of Us: Part Two, which follows Ellie and newcomer Abby on brutal, intertwined quests for revenge across North America.

There is a period of five years between Joel and Ellie’s arrival in Jackson at the end of the first game (and series), and the bloody events that set the second story in motion.

Co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the latter of whom is video game studio Naughty Dog’s (The Last of Us‘s developers) co-president, have previously confirmed that they would not be recasting the role of Ellie to account for the time jumps, and that Bella Ramsey would be reprising her role in season two.

“Obviously, the time jump is important, to some extent,” Mazin said in an interview with Collider. “It reflects the changing nature of Ellie’s relationship with Joel, as she gets older.

“In the game, she goes from 14 to 19, I believe. But no, we are not doing House of the Dragon leaps.

“Those were very significant leaps in age, and we don’t have that. So, no recasting will occur. Not on my watch.”

“House of the Dragon leaps” refers to controversial recasting in HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff, which meant large sections of chronology were sometimes skipped between episodes.

“Of course, in the second game, there’s a primary shift in time, but there are also moments that you see, that are in between the events of the main storyline of The Last of Us: Part Two and the storyline of The Last of Us: Part One,” Mazin continued.

In a separate interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mazin and Druckmann gave clues as to how they intend to make Ellie appear five years older.

“We know what we’re gonna do in terms of costume and makeup and hair, but more importantly, we also know the spirit and soul of the actor.”

Ramsey is currently 19, the age that Ellie is in The Last of Us: Part Two. This means that going forward, she’ll be closer to her character’s age than she was during season one, during which Ellie is 14.