HBO went all-out for its adaptation of the wildly successful and critically acclaimed video game The Last of Us. For the first season, the network threw a $73 million budget at the project, an amount that exceeds the budget given to the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, HBO’s most financially successful show. The plan was for The Last of Us, which was given the network’s coveted Sunday night slot, to become one of the marquee shows on the streaming platform Max (soon to be renamed back to HBO Max) and to draw in years of subscribers.
That was the plan. But then HBO cast a woman who believes that she is not a woman to play the lead role of a girl named Ellie. Disaster has followed.
Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie, used the press tour for the show’s first season to come out as nonbinary. “I guess my gender has always been very fluid,” she told the New York Times. “Someone would call me ‘she’ or ‘her’ and I wouldn’t think about it, but I knew that if someone called me ‘he’ it was a bit exciting.”
According to the LGBTQIA+ Wiki, those who take on a nonbinary identity can adopt roles as diverse as having “multiple genders,” experiencing “gender fluidity,” or having a different experience with gender “that doesn’t necessarily cause one to be genderless.” In other words, what exactly Bella Ramsey means by identifying as nonbinary is unclear, but she seemingly believes that she is neither a woman nor a man, but some constructed category in between.
In practice, her nonbinary identity means that she seeks to hide her femininity and disassociate herself from it. For The Last of Us, this physically manifested in her decision to bind her breasts during filming. Even she admitted that this is dangerous from a health perspective.
But far more impactful in The Last of Us than this physically tangible smothering of her femaleness was Ramsey’s decision to run from how women naturally interact in the world. Her version of a character who was originally rendered as compassionate is arrogant, snarky, obnoxious, and crass. With a single line, a line never uttered by any woman anywhere, Ramsey sealed the show’s dismal fate. “Holy shit,” says Ramsey, “I’m gonna be a dad.” This from a character who was originally a sweet teen girl. Ramsey’s neutered performance is particularly impactful on the show given that the novelty of The Last of Us was always that the main character in this apocalyptic video game, a genre not known to be dominated by women, was a teenage girl.
Despite her performance, Ramsey says that she adopted feminine mannerisms foreign to herself in order to play Ellie. “Playing these more feminine characters is a chance to be something so opposite to myself, and it’s really fun,” she said.
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The show’s second season has achieved an absolutely dismal 37 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and many viewers cite Bella Ramsey’s portrayal as the reason for their distaste. Meanwhile, fans of the video game are virtually up in arms over how Ramsey’s Ellie is totally distinct from the video game’s Ellie.
It was reported this week that season three of The Last of Us, which was renewed before the premiere of season two, will be delayed. Many have speculated that the purpose of the delay is to create some distance from the backlash. This is definitely not what HBO wanted to get out of the millions it poured into the show.
The media is helping HBO hide its failure by smearing the backlash against Ramsey’s portrayal of Ellie as a concerted campaign of hatred against LGBTQ people.
“[H]ateful viewers are angry that there are gay people in their video game adaptation,” said Out magazine. “Ramsey has received online trolling from critics annoyed at the inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters in the post-apocalyptic zombie video game,” said the Telegraph. “The toxic insults and criticism mainly focused on the actor’s non-binary identity, and more recently, the queer romantic storyline in the TV series,” said the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Of course, the reality is that fans just wanted an actress who looks and feels like the original Ellie. They don’t want an actress who seeks to be something other than a woman to play a beloved character who is a teenage girl.
Plus, the media’s take doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t they be up in arms if a show cast someone who identifies as a woman to play someone who identifies as nonbinary?
Bella Ramsey’s decision to pursue a nonbinary identity hurts her performance in The Last of Us, and it will continue to hurt her in future female roles. Her effort in her personal life to distance herself from being a woman will resound in those performances.
Of course, given that Ramsey is a woman, her identity won’t be totally debilitating for those roles.
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