Even along with her guts clenched within the fist of a large, Bella Ramsey appeared almost indomitable. This had been her effect for the reason that moment she’d first appeared in Game of Thrones’s sixth season, because the slight but commanding preteen Lady Lyanna Mormont, swiping attention from her far more famous co-stars and prompting YouTube compilations of “Lyanna Mormont Destroying People For two Minutes Straight.” Nobody, even those that most derided the hit HBO show’s final season, could resist Ramsey’s iron stare. In one in every of her last scenes as Lyanna, as a CGI wight squished her ribs and her already-shredded breaths turned to gasps, Ramsey set free a temporary but blood-freezing war cry and plunged her sword into the monster’s eye. Her character tumbled to the bottom and died moments later. Still, it’s the scream of determination her fans remember best.
And so “The North remembers.” Those words, spoken by Lady Mormont in season 6, helped cement Ramsey as a star even on the age of 12, though it might be several years before one other HBO show was clever enough to swing her to the highest of its solid billing.
This month, the now 19-year-old is entering one other legendary franchise because the lead role beside Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us, adapted from the beloved PlayStation video game that sold around one million copies inside every week of its release in 2013. Within the horror-adventure survival series, she plays 14-year-old Ellie, whom I think would get along swimmingly with Lyanna, considering their shared predilection for sparring with men twice their size. Born amidst the backdrop of fungus-ravaged, zombie-infested, authoritarian-controlled America, Ellie has an not easily seen scar on her forearm that makes her a miracle. That disfigured skin marks the remnants of a zombie bite, one she inexplicably survived without the dreaded cordyceps fungus bursting through her blood vessels and assuming control of her body. As such, there’s at the very least a likelihood— one—she may be the reply to a long-awaited cure.
Ellie’s reluctant caretaker in a cross-country quest to find these supposed vaccine developers is Pascal’s Joel, a smuggler with a blunted Texas accent. Firstly of the cordyceps outbreak, he lost his daughter, and so Ellie becomes the surrogate child he never wanted as her quips and determination wear at his protective steeliness. The premise isn’t latest, but any lover of the sport—and now of the show—will inform you the result’s extraordinary. Joel and Ellie forge a bond that far eclipses the necessity for survival; at the guts of their relationship is what and who we survive for, and the morality we sacrifice in the method. But to make that dynamic sing, it was essential that The Last of Us showrunners Neil Druckmann, who worked on the unique game, and Craig Mazin, of Chernobyl fame, find the appropriate actors.
The duo saw greater than 100 auditions for Ellie, all from women and girls various from ages 9 to their mid-twenties. In the sport, preteen Ellie was voiced and motion-captured by actress Ashley Johnson, who on the time was in her late twenties. Johnson’s portrayal created a “very weird alchemic wisdom to [Ellie],” as Mazin puts it. The character is “naive and he or she’s a baby, but she’s also really clever. She’s super smart and funny and dangerous and scared.” Mazin added, “Above all, you may have to simply love her. In order that’s a tall order.”
When Ramsey’s audition popped up within the audition queue, Mazin recognized her immediately: “I used to be like, oh shit, it’s Lady Mormont.” But he quelled his inner Game of Thrones fanboy in favor of his experience as a director, knowing even essentially the most talented actresses may very well be badly fitted to a job as particular as Ellie. Then he watched Ramsey open her mouth, and he panicked. He was almost positive he was the one one among the crew who’d watched the tape to this point.
“I used to be so freaked out that they weren’t going to see what I saw,” Mazin said. “Because in my mind, I used to be like, if we don’t solid Bella as Ellie, then I’ll go to my grave knowing that we could have made a greater show than we did.”
They saw what he saw. Mazin and Druckmann met with Ramsey over a Zoom callback, for which Ramsey says she prepared with a vicious treadmill walk, during which she repeatedly muttered one in every of Ellie’s beloved curse words—on this case, “Motherfucker.” From there, Ramsey officially clinched the role, and Mazin had his Ellie. What he didn’t recognize, on the time, was that he’d also found the piece of himself that was most like Joel. And that Ramsey would want it.
Toxicity was perhaps inevitable. Casting a live-action adaptation of a fan-beloved franchise is a notoriously controversial enterprise, and Ramsey didn’t look like Ellie—that’s, she didn’t have the just about doll-like features that had, after the sport’s release, sparked comparisons (and drama) with Elliot Page. Although there was plenty of pleasure upon the announcement that Lyanna Mormont would battle cordyceps, Ramsey scrolled through enough of the nastier reception to almost empathize along with her naysayers. “Consider me, I had my doubts, too,” she tells me during an interview in December. “It took a protracted time, actually, for me to just accept that I used to be Ellie, and that I may very well be her and that I used to be the appropriate fit. It took me while, even after we finished filming.”
In his more charitable moments, Mazin understands where the backlash got here from. There’s an Ellie that already exists for fans, an Ellie they love. “On this medium, there’s this latest kid and so they’re like, ‘Well, we didn’t want the brand new kid. We didn’t ask for the brand new kid. I don’t like this latest kid. She doesn’t appear to be the old kid,’” Mazin says. “Then what’s going to occur, in the event that they watch, is that they’re going to be like, ‘Well, the brand new kid’s advantageous. She’s not pretty much as good because the old kid, but the brand new kid’s okay.’ Then they are going to be like, ‘I sort of love this latest kid.’ Then eventually they are going to arrive at, ‘If anybody hurts this latest kid, I’ll kill them.’” The irony of this isn’t lost on Mazin, who points out that this emotional journey is precisely the one Joel goes through within the show.
And it’s one he went through himself. “I feel about [Ramsey] the best way Joel feels about Ellie, which is to say, after I read people saying things that I consider to be cruel, silly, I need to search out them and kill them with my hands,” Mazin says.
The director and star developed an unusually close relationship in the course of the 12 months wherein The Last Of Us filmed in Calgary, Canada, starting in July 2021. Upon meeting the then-juvenile Ramsey, he realized that, off-screen, the actress who’d played so many daring and insubordinate characters was, the truth is, “splendidly fragile.” They found a kinship of their shared proclivity for anxiety, shame, and catastrophizing, as Mazin puts it, developing a special vernacular to carry themselves aloft. They referred to standing next to one another, solitary and silent, as time spent “alone deluxe.” When asked how his day was going, Mazin might reply, “Well,” which meant not “good” but, moderately, “I’m down in a well, at the underside of a deep well.” Upon hearing this, Ramsey would imitate a tapping sound, to signal she was at the highest of this figurative well and would remain with him until he climbed out. The subsequent day, when Ramsey was “well,” Mazin would do the identical for her.
Now, Mazin signs off on his notes to Ramsey with “Yours permanently.” When asked about their relationship today, Ramsey’s voice audibly warms. “I feel like we each need one another as much as the opposite one does,” she says. “Our brains are very similar. So it was cool to see, to have that and to essentially understand my very own brain by with the ability to understand other people’s.”
It was during production in Canada that Ramsey turned 18—on a day without work, much to her chagrin—and it was while making The Last Of Us that she underwent a diagnosis process to learn she’s neurodivergent. “I’ve been considering for years that perhaps I used to be, after which to search out that out whilst filming this show was super special,” she says. Amongst her castmates—including Pascal, with whom she developed “this really special relationship, and I actually, really love him”—she felt secure, stable, and understood. These became milestones of a self-discovery process Ramsey has been on for years, starting with Game of Thrones and her subsequent success as star of the children fantasy program The Worst Witch, which she left in 2020.
“I never really was an anxious kid,” she says of her youth in Leicestershire, England, where she joined an amateur theater group on the age of three. “But I suppose that got exacerbated as I began working in high-pressured environments.” At 10, she auditioned for the Television Workshop in Nottingham, for which she made a reserve group but rarely attended sessions due to her football commitments on Saturdays. The subsequent 12 months, she auditioned again and made the fundamental group, through which she encountered casting director Nina Gold and eventually snagged her Game of Thrones audition.
Game of Thrones was a pleasant experience and an early brush with fame, though the results in her young life were bizarre. “I used to be very much a loner, didn’t really have any friends in secondary school—suddenly everybody desired to be my friend and confer with me,” Ramsey says. “I suppose that’s the primary time that I ever felt something was shifting in my life.” She began online homeschooling soon after, and continued to film two additional seasons of Thrones, way more screen time than showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had initially imagined for her small part.
During this same time, she was playing Mildred Hubble in The Worst Witch, a job she loved but found difficult to endure. Still a baby, she struggled in the course of the 16 weeks spent filming away from home. She developed what she’d later understand to be an eating disorder. The primary season aired in 2017, and Ramsey decided she wouldn’t return for a second, but commitment—and her inherent will power—convinced her to try again. Her experience was the identical. She promised herself she wouldn’t return for a 3rd chapter; she did so anyway. By that time, she’d mostly recovered from anorexia nervosa, a development she later credited on social media to her life-long relationship with Christianity. (Today, she says her faith has transformed into something less church-directed and into “one which [is] totally my very own,” though it continues to be “a fundamental a part of my life.”) But she knew the time had come to stop denying herself. She exited the show after three seasons, leaving Mildred to be recast with Lydia Page within the role.
“I realize it’s type of been publicized lots that I left [The Worst Witch] for mental health reasons,” Ramsey says. “I’d say the more accurate description is that I had resolved a variety of my mental health problems by that time. After which the concept was that, ‘I’m not going to do that fourth season since it’s not price it, because I’m in a greater place now. This isn’t something that I need to proceed to string out and have the recurring issues that stem from that first season. I don’t need or wish to do that anymore.’”
Such self-preservation is a fight she’s still navigating today, one which perhaps few of her fans or co-stars—except those that know her best, like Mazin and Pascal—recognize. In interviews and at work, she exudes an energy that one in every of her Last of Us scene partners, Euphoria‘s Storm Reid, calls “cool, calm, and picked up.” Mazin says it’s something of a vanishing act. The Lyanna Mormont effect, in the event you will.
“All of the fear goes away; all of the panic goes away; all of the stress goes away,” he says. “In those moments between motion and cut, she’s free. It’s been a privilege to present her one million of those moments. Then, in between, we just keep one another standing upright. That’s mainly the deal.”
Despite the real joys of self-discovery she experienced on the set of The Last of Us, Ramsey, who uses she/her and so they/them pronouns interchangeably, continues to be hesitant to affix herself with labels. “I believe, previously, I’ve had perhaps a rather unhealthy relationship with labels,” she explains. “The label of anorexia is one which I totally—it was like a comfort blanket for me. I held onto it an excessive amount of. So, I’m wary of them, but I also think that I, in some ways, don’t have the center to assign a label to myself.”
She recognizes the importance of labels to others, particularly for his or her ability to speak lived experiences and boost representation across marginalized groups. And she or he has began sharing raw bits and pieces of herself with the world; she told The Latest York Times last week that her gender “has all the time been very fluid’ and, when given the choice, she checks “nonbinary” on forms.
“I actually have labels that I assign to myself,” she tells me. “It’s just, publicly, I’m hesitant to speak about what those are, because there are still some things that—I’m, I suppose, becoming comfortable with and determining.” She backtracks. “Actually, I believe I’ve probably figured it out, but becoming comfortable with and owning, I suppose. I believe individuals who can publicly speak about who they’re, I believe that’s incredibly brave and I look as much as those people, nevertheless it’s not the type of thing that I can do yet, really.”
And people who have worked with Ramsey—and adored her—are ferocious of their protection of this selection. Even when, as a rule, they find yourself learning more from her than she from them. Lena Dunham, who directed Ramsey in the superb 2022 comedy Catherine Called Birdy, told me in an email interview, “I do know every director who works with Bella never desires to let her go.” She added, “I consider Bella a real lifelong friend, and was amazed because I went in determined to be a force for good in her life because the older and ‘wiser’ one, and Bella quickly proved to me that her own wisdom was all-encompassing.”
Now, as The Last Of Us begins its weekly rollout, Ramsey is finding a option to honor the experience on her own terms. She plans to look at the series alone each week, probably in her bedroom with the lights turned off. (On the time of our interview, she’d only seen the premiere episode to this point). She desires to experience Joel and Ellie as she did on set—alone, unsure but committed, thrown together with out a chemistry read or extensive rehearsals. Only then will she watch the episodes along with her family and friends. “I’m really not excellent at crying around other people, and so if I’m watching it for the primary time with my family or my friends, I just won’t feel all of the things that I would like to feel,” she says.
One thing she does know needless to say: She is going to play Ellie for so long as she’s allowed. “Perpetually,” she tells me, after I ask how long she’d be willing to commit to The Last of Us. There’s already talk of a second season focused on the events of The Last of Us Part II, the bestselling sequel game. And there are rumors, nonetheless unconfirmed, of more coming. (Druckmann told The Hollywood Reporter in early January, “I believe there’s more story to inform.”) “There’s no limits for me,” Ramsey says. “They will do as many games as they like, as many series as they like, and I’ll be here, flying back out to Canada.” She’s already watched gameplay from Part II, which features an older, more violent version of the Ellie we meet in the unique.
For his part, Mazin says he and “everybody at HBO” would like to see more of The Last of Us. “It’s not just like the series is supposed to go on eternally,” he says. “That’s not what we’re. But to get to the tip of the story within the time that we want to take to get to the right end could be awesome. If I set to work on a set with Bella Ramsey day by day for the remainder of my life, I’d be thrilled.”
Beyond The Last of Us, Ramsey doesn’t know what work lies ahead. She’s yet to commit to a different project; nothing has felt right to this point. Dunham imagines all kinds of inventive roles for the young actress, suggesting Ramsey “would make a killer Peter Pan, would really crush Amelia Earhart, and will also deliver quite an exceptional David Bowie.” For now, Ramsey is concentrated on Ellie—the character’s toughness, her sticky sense of self, the crossroads between her vulnerability and her fear. Like so many fans of the character, Ramsey has learned something essential about who she is and what she wants from Ellie. She will be able to’t describe it just yet, she says. “But perhaps I’ll give you the option to, someday.”
Photography by Jason Hetherington, hair by Mark Francome Painter, makeup by Gina Kane, and styling by Rachel Bakewell.
Associate Editor
Lauren Puckett-Pope is an associate editor at ELLE, where she covers film, TV, books and fashion.