The Last of Us Character Change Had Nothing to Do with Beyond

At one point, The Last of Us’ lead character Ellie looked a lot like Ellen Page – but now she doesn’t. Ironically, Quantic Dream’s upcoming PS3 title Beyond features the same actress in the lead role. It’s caused many people to speculate that Naughty Dog was forced to change the design of the character in The Last of Us due to the real actress’ involvement in David Cage’s next game.

But it's a “complete coincidence” according to the Uncharted developer. Chatting with Eurogamer.net, director Bruce Straley explained:

We didn’t even know what was going on with that. We don’t know what’s going on with other games.

We hear what people are saying – we didn’t realise that ourselves, because we just try to push for the characters that we want. And when we see the reactions we’re like, OK, we don’t like that. We want our characters to stand on their own two feet.

Straley continued that the changes to Ellie were actually designed to make the character look both younger, and a little more like her actress Ashley Johnson.

He continued:

We went a little bit younger, and we think that we got a little bit more Ashley inside of there, which we like. And we really want to respect Ashley for the great performance that she’s giving us.

The Last of Us is due out next year on PlayStation 3.