What Do Hbo’s ‘The Last of Us’ Characters Look Like in the Video Game?

HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us officially dropped on Sunday, and it was spectacular.

Fans of Naughty Dog’s games finished the premiere episode with heavy but hopeful hearts. The show’s care for the source material and flawless recreation of key video game scenes hit the nail directly on the head, and exemplified for studios — and fans everywhere — that video games can be adapted, and well, if approached by the right team. 

Fans are celebrating the show’s many wins in the wake of its arrival, and many of these can be attributed to the team behind the series. Impactful writing, gorgeous cinematography, and stellar acting all contributed to the show’s success, as did the games that inspired it. Those games are still considered amongst the very best video game releases of all time, and newcomers are just starting to realize why.

Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, and the rest of the actors striving to bring The Last of Us to live-action are entirely up to the task, if the show’s first episode is any indication. They’re fully encompassing characters some fans have loved for years, complete with their mannerisms, accents, and excellently reproduced costumes. No actor can flawlessly copy a video game character, of course, so there are differences between the characters’ video game and live action counterparts, but they’re few and far between.

The Last of Us video game versions of the HBO series characters

Some of the characters in HBO’s Last of Us adaptation are almost exact replicas of their video game counterparts, and some put a bit more distance between the two. None of them are far removed from the games that inspired HBO’s latest hit, but there are a few notable changes to Naughty Dog’s original character designs.

Joel Miller

Pedro Pascal fully transformed into Joel for The Last of Us — so much so that it’s already hard to picture the character in any other skin. He does look a touch different in the video games, but it’s hard to find anything lacking in Pascal’s delivery. Some fans will certainly try — complaints about Pascal’s beard already drench the web — but we can’t find a thing wrong with the Game of Thrones veteran’s take on the character.