Warning: The following article contains spoilers for The Last of Us season one finale, “Look for the Light.”
The final episode of the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us introduced us to one last character by way of Anna Williams (portrayed by the original Ellie, Ashley Johnson), who just so happens to be Ellie’s mother.
Anna’s inclusion in HBO’s adaptation was a welcome inclusion, particularly because it offered up some much-needed context as to how Ellie came to be immune from the cordyceps virus that more or less ended the world. However, Anna isn’t a character that originated with the HBO show.
It turns out that game director and HBO co-showrunner Neil Druckmann intended to introduce Anna to The Last of Us fandom much earlier. How much earlier? Almost immediately after the original game was released back in 2013. He gives us insight into where Anna came from on HBO’s The Last of Us Podcast:
“In the game, she’s defined by a note that she’s left [Ellie], and a switchblade that she passes down to her. And then, once we’d finished production on the game, there was an opportunity to do an animated short with a studio that was interested in working with us. So I had written a short story about Ellie’s mom, and the day she gave birth to Ellie. And then things fell through, and that story had to get shelved.”
Druckmann was still quite invested in the short story he’d written, and even went on to muse about how he ran the idea of creating a live-action short film around Anna, but all of the minds involved were too busy and it ended up falling by the wayside once again.
Of course, at this point, we wouldn’t have had Anna introduced any other way – particularly given the meta-symbolism of Ashley Johnson being given the opportunity to play TV Ellie’s mom.
All nine episodes of HBO’s The Last of Us are now streaming on HBO Max.