Maisie Williams, star of HBO’s Game of Thrones as the young and violent Arya Stark, is currently in negotiations to play a lead role in the upcoming film adaptation of Naughty Dog’s award winning video game The Last of Us.
Williams is currently 17, around the same age as the game’s main character "Ellie", who Williams would most likely play.
In the game, Ellie is a survivor in a postapolcalyptic world who seems strangely immune to the disease that has infected and killed most of the world’s population. Figuring out what makes Ellie immune and bringing her somewhere safe becomes the mission of male lead Joel. The two exchange banter and grow to rely on one another as they travel through the devastated ruins of several American cities. The two’s relationship is one of the reasons the game sold so well and almost universally praised by video game critics.
According to Eurogamer, Adam B. Vary, Buzzfeed’s film reporter, tweeted that there had been meetings between the movie’s producers (including, as we reported, Sam Raimi) and Williams, but nothing concrete had come of it.
Vary also tweeted the following, mentioning that Ashley Johnson, the game’s voice actor for Ellie, would not be in the film in the main role, but strongly hinted that that she might find some other role to play in order to have a wink to the game-playing audience.
"In an ideal world, Ashley Johnson would be 14. But there's some way to get those actors into the film." —Neil Druckmann on LAST OF US film.
— Adam B. Vary (@adambvary) July 25, 2014
Eurogamer also noted that Neil Druckmann, the game’s creative director, also insisted that the studio will have creative control in the film’s major decisions like a cast and director. This is possibly to avoid more backlash, as there was for the recently confirmed Uncharted movie, which, as we noted, might not follow the game’s plot.
Druckmann is writing a script for the film, changing the ending from the controversial but extremely emotionally effecting ending of the game. Producer Raimi, however, convinced Druckmann against this. The script, says Druckmann, is still “evolving.”
According to Polygon, the film was announced in March, but is still in early development.
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