Following her live-action appearance in HBO’s The Last of Us, Ashley Johnson is back on fans’ minds.
The beloved actress behind Naughty Dog’s Ellie Williams has a healthy live-action resume to go along with her flush video game experience, but many fans of her voice work were unfamiliar with the actress’s IRL performances. She’s been in plenty of film and television roles before — starting all the way back with an early role in Growing Pains — but fans are largely finding themselves familiar with a role in one, major blockbuster franchise. Johnson’s role in the very first Avengers flick may have been small, but fans are still looking fondly back on it more than a decade later.
Who did Ashley Johnson play in The Avengers?
Johnson made her MCU debut back in the franchise’s early days, but unfortunately has yet to return to the sprawling cinematic franchise. She appeared in The Avengers as a background character, but one with a surprisingly important role in the film. She was initially intended to serve a far larger purpose overall — with rumors and a deleted scene even indicating she was a candidate for Steve’s next romance — but her ultimate status in the MCU never moved beyond the sidelines.
In the first Avengers flick, a pair of scenes highlight Johnson’s character, a waitress named Beth at a restaurant near what will eventually be Avenger’s tower, as the battle between the Avengers and Loki’s invading army unravels. A range of deleted scenes expand her role in the film extensively, but even in the final cut she’s seen fleeing from falling debris, nearly dying in the bank scene, and — at the end of the film — engaging in an interview thanking the Avengers, and noting that “Captain America saved my life.”
Had several scenes made the final cut, we would have seen Johnson’s Beth play a far larger role, first as a fleeing civilian and later as a love interest for Steve. A deleted conversation between she and Cap even sports what may have been one of the franchise’s best Stan Lee cameos, after he tells Steve to “ask for her number, you moron.”
In the end, Johnson’s role was relatively minor, but her renewed popularity — in the wake of her live-action The Last of Us appearance — is reminding fans of that long-ago role. Interested viewers can catch her in a range of other projects, including Recess, Teen Titans, and The Legend of Vox Machina. She’s also provided stellar vocal talent to a range of video games on top of the Last of Us franchise, with Marvel Heroes, Tales from the Borderlands, and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire all sporting her recognizable voice.