It turns out that Merle Dandridge isn’t the only actor from the video game The Last of Us to play the same role in the HBO show. So, technically, Laura Bailey is, too. She’s just not the first character fans think of when they hear the name. In the climax of the last episode of the first season, Joel (Pedro Pascal) brings Ellie (Bella Ramsay) to Team Firefly. But when he finds out that in order to make a vaccine, doctors have to remove the cordyceps from Ellie’s brain, which will kill her, he saves her out of anger.
Joel ran through the hospital quickly and crashed through the door of the operating room, scaring the doctor and two nurses who were working on Ellie. The credits for the episode show that Bailey is one of the nurses.
Fans of video games are familiar with Bailey’s voice and motion-capture work as Abby, a key character in The Last of Us Part II, which we won’t talk about because it would give away too much. Bailey, on the other hand, has been doing voice work for games for a long time and also spoke in The Last of Us, the first movie of 2013.
Neil Druckmann, who worked on both the HBO show and the video game, confirmed that Bailey did the voice of a nurse in the operating room. In the new version, the actress is playing the same part.
“‘Come on,’ she said. Let me do it. I’d like to be on the show,'” Craig Mazin, one of the other hosts of the show, said in a virtual meeting with Druckmann. “We told them, ‘We love you,'” Of course!'” “By the way, I won’t tell you which one,” he said. “These two nurses look alike.”
None of the producers ruled out Bailey making a big cameo or guest appearance in season 2 or later, like they did with Ashley Johnson, Troy Baker, Jeffrey Pierce, and Dandridge, all of whom have been on the show for a long time. The same thing. Druckmann said of Pele, “Maybe next season we’ll do something different with her.” “I mean, she wears a mask, so we can do anything we want with her next season,” agrees Mazin.
Mazin also said that they filmed the scene in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada, in an old hospital that was about to be torn down. As he showed Bailey the set, he said, “She started crying just by looking at it.” The same thing happened when Mel put on Marlene’s wig for the first time. Neil’s Game made her cry. Stepping out of the world feels like stepping into this impossible world, like the best VR version of “The Last of Us.”
Druckmann says, “Bailey sent me this really, really funny picture she took on the day that scene was shot.” “Because, if you know who she’s playing in the next story, it has a lot to do with the operating room. Maybe when the season is over, I’ll tweet them this picture.”