If you've already sat down and watched The Last of Us season 2 opening, you might have noticed that the character of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) is more slight in stature than her game counterpart.
While Abby lacks a physical threat (something that certainly made her stand out in The Last of Us Part 2) co-showrunner Craig Mazin reveals that the muscularity of the character is something that was discussed during the lead-up to the second season. However, a nugget of wisdom from fellow showrunner Neil Druckmann ultimately put paid to the notion of Abby needing serious traps and biceps for her character still to work.
"One of the things that we talked about early on when casting Abby was the physicality of the character," Mazin tells GamesRadar+. "Obviously in the game she's physically really strong. She's so muscular. And I asked Neil [Druckmann], 'Why?'... He said, 'In gameplay, when you are switching between characters, you need to have a contrast of the mechanism of play itself. When you become Ellie in the first game, you understand you are not Joel."
"When [Naughty Dog] were talking about The Last of Us Part 2 and they knew that Abby was going to be this prospective character, they needed to know how her gameplay will be different than Ellie's. That informed the physicality there."
But, for Mazin, Abby's physicality wasn't "essential" to the story they were trying to tell.
Mazin says, "In that way, we understood it was not as essential for our storytelling purposes. Because there is no gameplay; there is merely observation."
The Last of Us season 2 is now airing weekly on HBO in the US and Sky and NOW TV in the UK. For more, head on over to our The Last of Us season 2 release schedule.
For a deeper dive into the premiere, be sure to check out The Last of Us season 2, episode 1 game differences and an answer to the question you may be asking: 'who is Eugene?'
