Last of Us TV show Abby actor is well aware of the backlash to the character

Kaitlyn Dever has said she is aware of the reaction to the character of Abby from a section of Last of Us Part 2 players.

Dever will play Abby in the second season of HBO’s Last of Us TV adaptation, which premieres on April 13.

When asked if she had seen the backlash to the video game portrayal of the character, Dever said that while she was aware of it, she couldn’t focus on it when developing her interpretation of the character.

“Well, it’s hard not to see those things on the internet,” said Dever. “It’s hard not to stop myself from looking at it every once in a while, especially going into this, for sure. And I want to do this character justice and make the fans proud by bringing her to life in this kind of way.”

When Abby’s character was introduced to the franchise, some of her actions in the story of The Last of Us 2, which we won’t spoil, led to an online hate campaign that targeted creator Neil Druckmann and original actor Laura Bailey.

“My main focus was just the collaboration between Neil and Craig, and making sure I was really getting to the core of who she is and what drives her and her emotional state; her anger and her frustration and her grief and all of that. I wanted to make sure that that was what I was focusing most of my energy on,” Dever told Screen Rant.

The show’s debut season covered the events of the first The Last of Us, which was released at the tail end of the PS3 generation in June 2013, while the second season covers part of The Last of Us Part 2, which debuted for PS4 seven years later.

Craig Mazin told Variety that he and fellow showrunner Druckmann currently expect to tell the whole The Last of Us story over the course of three or four seasons.

“It feels like we’ve got one or two more seasons [after the second one], ”he said. “It’s getting harder to make, because every episode gets big. You don’t want to wait four years for a 17-episode finish, or whatever it is.”