The Last of Us actor Merle Dandridge to reprise game role for HBO series

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

HBO has revealed the name of another cast member from their series adaptation of the video game The Last of Us, and this time it is not someone who's new to the franchise. Merle Dandridge has signed on the play the character Marlene on the show, and this is a character Dandridge did the vocal performance for in both the 2013 video game The Last of Us and its 2020 sequel The Last of Us Part II.

Marlene is "the head of the Fireflies, a resistance movement struggling for freedom against an oppressive military regime."

In addition to voice work on video games, Dandridge has appeared on popular TV shows like Angel, NCIS, 24, CSI: Miami, Criminal Minds, Sons of Anarchy, Suits, Murphy Brown, and Greenleaf.

Starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, The Last of Us will be set 

twenty years after modern civilization has been destroyed. Joel (Pascal), a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie (Ramsey), a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey, as they both must traverse across the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.

Pascal's character Joel, "tormented by past trauma and failure, must trek across a pandemic-ravaged America, all the while protecting a girl who represents the last hope of humanity." Ramsey's Ellie is "a 14-year-old orphan who has never known anything but a ravaged planet and who struggles to balance her instinct for anger and defiance with her need for connection and belonging… as well as the newfound reality that she may be the key to saving the world."

Gabriel Luna is playing Joel's brother Tommy, "a former soldier who hasn't lost his sense of idealism and hope for a better world."

The series is a co-production with Sony Pictures Television, PlayStation Productions, Word Games, The Mighty Mint, and game developer Naughty Dog. The video game's creative director Neil Druckmann serves as executive producer alongside Carolyn Strauss, Naughty Dog's Evan Wells, Asad Qizilbash and Carter Swan of PlayStation Productions, and the show's writer Craig Mazin.