Who Is Kathleen in HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’?

Warning: the following article contains spoilers for The Last of Us episode four ‘Please Hold My Hand.’

If episode three of HBO’s The Last of Us, ‘Long Long Time’, taught us anything, it’s that the live-action television adaptation isn’t shying away from veering off the beaten path set out by the game that inspired it.

While most of the primary narrative beats have remained the same thus far, there’s plenty of little details and character motivations that The Last of Us has opted to flesh out, such as getting to know Sarah better, Bill and Franks arc, as well as Joel and Tess’s history as smugglers in the post-apocalypse.

Well, these embellishments aren’t slowing down any time soon, with episode four of The Last of Us, titled ‘Please Hold My Hand’, introducing us to a character that is completely original to the HBO adaptation who goes by Kathleen. Let’s dig into what we know about her. 

Who is Kathleen in HBO’s The Last of Us?

Kathleen (played by Melanie Lynskey) appears to be the leader of a group of survivors, scavengers, and bandits who have made themselves a home in Kansas City. It also looks like she and her peers managed to drive out, or perhaps kill off, the forces of FEDRA, the tyrannical government body that calls the shots in the United States’ remaining quarantine zones. 

Kathleen is just as brutal as any other survivor out there, if not more. She is out for vengeance against a list of people who were seemingly conspirators with FEDRA, who her group has successfully eliminated. She interrogates a doctor who claims to have brought her into the world about the whereabouts of Henry, someone who seems to have given the FEDRA information that led to the capture and execution of Kathleen’s brother.

After Joel and Ellie’s arrival in the city, Kathleen ends up with bigger problems on her hands after our leading duo fend off and kill two of her goons. Her right hand man is Perry, played by Jeffrey Pierce, who incidentally brought life to Tommy in the original The Last of Us game. 

Essentially, Kathleen appears to be an effort by The Last of Us showrunners to humanize the scores of bandits that Joel would have otherwise been mowing down one after the other in the video game, while continuing to flesh out the theme of love and the insane things it will drive people to do.