Kaitlyn Dever reveals she was nervous to star opposite Pedro Pascal in The Last Of Us Season 2

The second season of The Last of Us hasn’t even aired yet, but it’s already stirring emotion and controversy among longtime fans. This time, much of that anticipation circles around Kaitlyn Dever, who steps into the role of Abby, one of the franchise’s most debated and complex characters. Even for an actor with Dever’s range and experience, joining a show of this emotional scale came with pressure. And sharing the screen with Pedro Pascal? That didn’t exactly make it easier.

Reflecting on her first days on set, she said,

"I was nervous, I was anxious, but also very excited."

Pascal’s presence, she explained while talking to Entertainment Tonight, had a quiet intensity that pulled everyone into the moment,

"It's a tall order for sure. I was definitely nervous, but I didn't feel as nervous when I got onto set, because he's just so wonderful. I just love him... He holds a special place in my heart."

Stepping into a world as emotionally loaded as The Last of Us is one thing. Stepping into Abby’s shoes, opposite a character as iconic as Joel? That’s a whole other weight to carry.

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From comedies to trauma dramas, how Dever found her way to Abby

Before entering this post-pandemic hellscape, Kaitlyn Dever had already made a name for herself playing young women navigating chaos: personal, institutional, and emotional.

In the Netflix series Unbelievable, she portrayed a sexual assault survivor whose quiet, restrained performance landed her critical acclaim. And in Booksmart, she swung to the other end of the spectrum: a whip-smart teenager in a coming-of-age comedy with heart and wit. The roles couldn’t be more different, and that’s the point. Dever has a way of making each character feel lived-in like you’ve known them for years, even when they’re only on screen for a few minutes.

That instinct is exactly what the showrunners were looking for in Abby.

"I want to do this character justice and make the fans proud by bringing her to life in this kind of way,” Dever shared.

She didn’t set out to replicate the video game version of Abby beat for beat. She studied the character deeply but focused on what she could bring to the emotional weight Abby carries. That meant training, yes, but it also meant understanding grief, moral conflict, and the need for survival at any cost.

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Casting backlash, body politics, and what really defines a character

From when Dever’s casting was announced, the internet had opinions, some loud, some surprisingly thoughtful, and many completely divided. In the game, Abby is muscular, broad-shouldered, and physically imposing, her body the result of years of training and life in a world where strength means survival. Some fans felt the showrunners strayed too far by choosing an actress with a smaller frame, claiming the physicality was part of who Abby is.

But others pushed back, arguing that Abby’s identity wasn’t just about muscle mass. It was about loss, vengeance, and the cost of living with impossible choices. The show's creators, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann made their reasoning clear: Dever was chosen because of the depth she brought to the role.

“We value performance over anything else...We need someone to really capture the essence of those characters.... We don't value as much, 'Do they look exactly like the character with their eyebrows or their nose or their body?' Whatever it is. It's not nowhere on the priority list, but it's below a bunch of other things that we consider,” Druckmann said.

And honestly, that’s what resonates with you when you watch her, not whether she looks like the video game character, but whether she feels like her.

This casting debate, at its core, taps into a bigger conversation. In a world that craves representation and accuracy, how much weight should physical appearance carry? When does fidelity to the source material become a creative straightjacket? With Abby, those questions become even trickier because she is a symbol, for better or worse, of how far someone will go when grief takes over.

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Adapting isn't copying, it's translating emotion across mediums

One thing the creators have been clear about: The Last of Us isn’t trying to copy the game. It’s trying to adapt it, to translate not just the story beats, but the emotional undercurrent that made people care in the first place. That means giving themselves room to shift what needs shifting, whether it’s dialogue, pacing, or, yes, appearance.

In Abby’s case, that shift means looking beyond her biceps. The game emphasized her strength with visuals; the show wants to explore it through feeling. Dever doesn’t have to swing a hammer to show how heavy Abby’s world is. She wears it in her silences. In the way she holds her breath when grief creeps in. That’s performance, not physique.

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When survival gets personal: guilt, grief, and the people we become

From the beginning, The Last of Us has never been about zombies. It’s been about people, about what they do when there’s nothing left to lose, and how far they’ll go to protect the people they love.

In season two, we find Joel and Ellie trying to settle into life in Jackson, a community that feels almost too peaceful. But peace doesn’t erase the past. Joel’s decision to save Ellie, and everything he did to make that happen, still lingers between them.

Then Abby enters the picture, and things unravel quickly. For her, Joel isn’t a hero. He’s the man who killed her father. And when you look at it from her perspective, revenge feels less like cruelty and more like gravity.

What makes Abby so fascinating, and so divisive, is how much she reflects Joel himself. Both of them hurt people for love. Both of them are broken in ways they don’t always understand. And both of them are trying, in their own twisted ways, to find something that feels like redemption.

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A world without rules, and the echoes of dystopias past

Even though The Last of Us comes from a video game, it shares its soul with some of the most haunting dystopian stories in literature and film. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is the clearest touchpoint, a father and son wandering through a world stripped of hope, where love becomes the last act of resistance. Children of Men, Station Eleven, and even the silence-heavy moments of Arrival, all of these works seep into the DNA of the show.

But unlike Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, The Last of Us isn’t about oppressive governments or control. It’s about the absence of control. There are no rules here, no systems left to rebel against. There are just people, messy, grieving, desperate people, trying to figure out how to live without losing what makes them human.

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What’s left when the world collapses? Maybe just us

At its heart, The Last of Us asks one aching question over and over again: What does it mean to be human when the world no longer demands it? When survival becomes instinct, and violence becomes a habit, what part of us still chooses kindness? That’s what characters like Ellie and Abby wrestle with. One is still learning what she’s capable of. The other already knows, and it haunts her.

That’s why Kaitlyn Dever’s casting matters. Not because she matches Abby’s silhouette, but because she gets what it means to carry weight without showing it. She brings an emotional honesty that doesn’t need armor. It just needs presence. And in a story like this, that’s everything.

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So what now?

Season 2 drops in April 2025, and fans are already dissecting every teaser, still image, and rumored scene. But here’s what we do know: it’s going to be heavier. It’s going to be more complicated. And it’s going to force us to look at characters we thought we understood, Joel, Ellie, Abby, and ask ourselves if we really ever knew them at all.

And maybe that’s the brilliance of this adaptation. It’s not just retelling a story. It’s inviting us to see it again, differently, painfully, more fully. Because the truth is, no two people read the same book. So why should we expect them to watch the same show?