The Last of Us star Isabela Merced reveals ‘gay women cried on set’ after key Ellie and Dina scene

Isabela Merced was advised not to play Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic video game hit The Last of Us before she began filming her role as Dina in season two of the HBO adaptation. Too bad.“I didn’t know that though,” Merced protests today.

“Before I had the [casting] meeting, I’d already played the whole game.”It was the second game she played, the one which she is now recreating for the small screen. She had good reason: Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, the show’s creators, had asked her team for a mystery meeting, and she assuredly assumed it was for a role in the eight-time Emmy Award-winning series.



“I figured it was. I put two and two together. I’m like, ‘Yeah, of course it is,” she says, coolly.

In one weekend, she binged the game and had the chat. “It was a blur. They chose me.

I didn’t even have to audition or anything.”It all worked out. Druckmann has said he doesn’t want his actors to play so they aren’t simply delivering a “poor imitation” of the game avatars.

For Merced, playing was rather “such a good cheat sheet”, and a successful one too: at the US premiere of season two, Shannon Woodward, Dina’s voice actor in the game, offered her congratulations. “[She] was like, ‘Great job! I was like, ‘Ah, sweet!’ That’s all I need.”This is a role of extremes, and that’s aside from the months-long filming schedule in icy British Columbia last year.

Currently best known for popcorn cinema efforts Transformers: The Last Knight and Dora and the Lost City of Gold, The Last of Us is easily the most esteemed role of the Peruvian-American actress’s career. The first season’s premiere in 2023 racked up 40 million viewers, and the season as a whole became one of HBO’s biggest all-time hits. Then there’s the video games prestige: the second instalment is the second most awarded game in history, and fans have chewn each character’s features, traits and arc to pulp.

Isabela Merced as Dina in episode one of The Last of Us season two. (HBO)Dina is a major player in game two, and hence season two. It begins years after the end of the first, with survivalists Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) now living in a community settlement in Jackson, Wyoming, their relationship fractured by Joel’s decision to save Ellie from being probed by the Fireflies for a cure to for cordyceps outbreak.

Dina is Ellie’s confidant-turned-lover, a relief in Ellie’s often brutal world.“Ellie sort of takes on Joel’s role in a way in this season and becomes the hard ass with the issues, and Dina is softening her like Ellie does to Joel,” Merced says. “I’m just another point of access to their relationship, and it’s perfect.

”Isabela Merced is underplaying her role in the season but if it’s due to nerves, she doesn’t show it. She’s remarkably poised for a 23-year-old, perched on a sofa in the furthest corner of the furthest room in a suave London hotel, her mother Katherine by her side. She’s in a faux fur-trimmed dress, dark hair slicked back, her face porcelain and bright with Hollywood luminosity, even as she tucks into ramen.

She smoothly swerves talk of how Dina’s story may be plumped with the second game being broken into two or more seasons. “There’s still going to be questions that people have at the end of this season,” she shrugs, Katherine laying a white towel over her lap to catch flecks of stray broth. “So, um, for me, it was about really focusing on the present moment and not really thinking about the future.

Working on my relationship with Bella, that was my priority. I wanted people to fall in love with Ellie through Dina’s experience, you know?”The Last of Us stars Isabela Merced and Bella Ramsey. (Getty)In season two episode one, Ellie and Dina’s friends-to-lovers trajectory begins at pace; by the end, they’re slow dancing at the settlement’s centre in a church.

Dina leans in for a kiss, Ellie kisses back softly, apprehensively, cautious of letting her tough shell be cracked. “Everything leading up to the kiss was planned very meticulously. I really love that they kept Ellie having her eyes open for the initial kiss, sort of in disbelief of the moment,” Merced says.

Though they had an intimacy coordinator, it was the chemistry she had with Ramsey on and off set that allowed the moment to flourish. “Bella is such a non-threatening person which is completely the opposite of Ellie, but I felt so comfortable. We could really, for the love of these characters, explore how to approach that and the different ways and do it a billion times, and I wasn’t uncomfortable with it.

”Rewatching the scene was emotional. “All the gay women on the set, we all went and watched playback, like people were crying,” she smiles. “It’s not just like, ‘Oh the gay girl, the side character.

It’s like, this is the main character. It’s so beautiful. It’s so cinematic.

”The scene ends with one of the community’s elders telling the pair to part as it’s a “family event”, rounding off by calling them “d*kes”. Ellie rages, but Joel takes action on their behalf, knocking the man to the ground with distinctly more dramatics than in the game. Merced is keen to note the importance of context: the pandemic began in 2003, and the world’s inhabitants haven’t exactly have LGBTQ+ equality at the front of their minds.

“It’s a little bit like he’s holding on to the past,” she says. Dina and Ellie dance at the end of season two episode one. (HBO)Dina’s reaction is “an eyeroll, because it’s almost like they’re not really aware of the LGBT community and the struggles they face.

” She eyes her noodles. “Even I had to go out of my way when I was growing up to learn about that, you know? Society’s past homophobia, it’s sort of infused into the show in such a smart way, because these kids didn’t grow up with that knowledge or that experience. Gay people still exist because, I mean, the Clickers didn’t go for them first – as much as some people would like them to,” she says with a fit of giggles.

It’s true: despite critical and commercial success, and some heftily pro-LBGTQ+ source material from the original Naughty Dog games, HBO’s first season was review-bombed by homophobes furious with Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank’s (Murray Bartlett) romance, and Ellie’s kiss with her friend Riley (Storm Reid). As season two becomes consistently, clearly queer, Merced has words for those upset: “They’re gonna have to put up with it. Sit back and watch – or don’t!”That’s all the attention they’re getting.

She’d rather focus on the positives. “Even the game was so ahead of its time. I just hadn’t seen lesbians carrying a story like this in the gaming world.

I was like, ‘Are you kidding? People love this s**t? Are you telling me that this would fly back in the day?’” Merced was 12 at the time the first game was released, and much of her adulthood has existed parallel to simmering anti-LGBTQ+ culture wars.“That was what made me so inspired and happy about it. And then for the show to nod to the progressiveness and, like.

..” She pauses, reassessing.

“Not even progressive, it’s just the realness of gay people existing and acknowledging that and just making it not like, ‘Oh, they’re gay!’ but more so, ‘Oh, they’re humans! It was just so lovely.”Fans of the game will know that The Last of Us season two is about to be anything but lovely. Dina is an anchor for Ellie, but even they are about to begin a bumpy ride.

There’s a gorgeous, delicate moment during the dance – Merced in one of the episode’s best performances – in which she tells Ellie that the men in the room are jealous of her, and Ellie counters, saying she’s not a threat. “Oh Ellie. I think they should be terrified of you,” comes Dina’s chilling response.

“It’s an acknowledgement of Ellie’s power, but it’s also an acknowledgement of her submission to her power in a way. It’s just so sexy to me, because it’s like, you’re the dude. You’re the guy,” Merced laughs.

“Everyone should be terrified of you.”The Last of Us season two airs Sundays on HBO in the US and Monday morning on Sky and NOW in the UK.The post The Last of Us star Isabela Merced reveals ‘gay women cried on set’ after key Ellie and Dina scene appeared first on PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news.

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