This article contains spoilers for both “The Last of Us” on HBO, particularly Season 2 Episode 2, “Through the Valley,” and the 2020 video game “The Last of Us Part II.” If you don’t want to read any game spoilers, stop reading now!

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In “Through the Valley,” the second episode of the sophomore season of HBO’s adaptation of “The Last of Us,” fans of the original Naughty Dog game series got the moment they’ve been waiting for (and likely dreading). Joel Miller, the protagonist of the story played by Pedro Pascal, meets a bloody, grotesque end at the hands of Abby Anderson (Kaitlyn Dever), the daughter of a man Joel once killed to save his own (surrogate) daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). I’m not saying anyone should be happy about this. The scene is, to put it lightly, gutting to watch. Ramsey’s performance as Ellie, who’s pinned to the floor and begging for Joel’s life, is absolutely heartbreaking. And then there’s Dever, who takes Abby — the character made infamous in 2020’s “The Last of Us Part II” — to a psychopathic extreme, snarling and taunting Joel in his final moments and taking apparent delight in beating him so hard that she snaps the shaft of a golf club, the jagged end of which she drives into his neck to finish the job.

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Abby’s actress from the game, Laura Bailey, who performed the role in the game using her voice and with motion-capture, faced extreme backlash after people played through this scene, to the point where some “fans” of “The Last of Us Part II” threatened her safety. I genuinely worry that Dever, an actress who’s been working steadily since 2011, is going to end up in similarly cruel crosshairs. She shouldn’t. Dever is perfect as Abby, lack of an overly ripped body be damned. (What’s funny, though, is that Abby’s incredibly built physique in the game also made people mad, so to see complaints about it in the wilds of the Internet is genuinely frustrating.) 

Here’s what Dever does to make Abby so captivating, aided by some clever writing choices by showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann. We get a scene (that’s not in the game) where, in a dream, present-day Abby walks through the Firefly hospital where Joel killed her father, only to be advised by her past self, establishing the genuine pain and sadness in Abby’s heart. Then, in the major scene where Abby kills Joel, Dever imbues Abby with a rage that feels utterly all-consuming with a clearly discernable tinge of real grief, both for her father and over what she’s about to do. She’s brilliant. Anyone who doubted this casting choice should be eating their words.

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In interviews released after “Through the Valley,” Kaitlyn Dever revealed something particularly heartbreaking: Mere days before filming her big scene with Pedro Pascal’s Joel in February of 2024, Dever’s mother Kathy died from breast cancer. In a profile in Vulture, Dever said of this experience, “Abby’s a grieving person; that’s what fuels her anger. I could relate to her, and that was a surprise to me because I wasn’t expecting to do those scenes while actually living through grief.”

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Dever also spoke to Entertainment Weekly – as did Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann, Pascal, and the episode’s director Mark Mylod, just to name a few — for a cover story on “Through the Valley” and told the outlet that she was “in a fog” while filming, considering that her mother’s memorial service was just three days before production started filming the Abby-Joel sequence. I truly cannot imagine what Dever went through while working on this scene. It’s devastating beyond belief that she worked on such an intense moment right after experiencing a real-life loss. 

The actress also shared that she didn’t prepare for the shoot as she would normally. “Because of my life circumstances, I wasn’t actually able to do my normal routine as an actor, which was really interesting because I was kind of worried about it,” Dever revealed. “Usually if I have a monologue like that, I’m memorizing it three weeks before I do it. I had a different approach, and I think that it really served the character in a lot of ways. I was able to sort of … I don’t know, just really let it go and not think about it too much because the words on the page are so powerful anyway.”

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I bring this all up to say that Dever’s artistry is extraordinary, and knowing the circumstances under which she filmed her most pivotal scene yet as Abby makes the scene somehow even more impactful. Mazin spoke to this in Dever’s Vulture profile, saying that Dever’s interpretation of Abby carries real and true sadness … which isn’t present in the game. “She turns back to [Joel], and the truest tear I’ve ever seen just falls right out of her eye,” Mazin remarked. “And you understand in that moment how profoundly sad she is, even as she’s being cruel. That there’s something she’s killing in herself while this is happening.”

Anyone who’s played “The Last of Us Part II” knows that the gameplay is split between Ellie and Abby, and based on the fact that the series has already been renewed for season 3, it seems like Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are going to take their time telling the stories of both of these girls — both of whom have been wronged by the violence of the world, and both of whom are driven by fury and revenge. With only two episodes of season 2 of “The Last of Us” under our belt, we don’t know when we’ll get the same perspective shift we see in the game (without getting too specific if you ignored the spoiler warning for some reason, three particular days in Seattle prove important for both Ellie and Abby down the line). All signs, though, point to Kaitlyn Dever taking center stage at some point. So how will she handle whatever backlash comes her way?

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“I’m taking all of this as it comes,” Dever told James Hibberd for EW. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to plan for it. I don’t know how people are going to react. I hope that people appreciate what I did with the role, and that’s all I can really do. I feel good sitting in that space just because I really don’t have any control. It’s done. What I did is out there, it’s going to happen. I think that in playing the role, I obviously wanted to do the game character justice, but also bring my own authenticity to the role and humanize her in the best way that I could. With the help of Craig and Neil developing who that character was going to be, I’m very, very proud of it.”

She should be proud, and if there’s any justice in the world, this could earn Dever her first Emmy. “The Last of Us” airs new episodes on Sundays on Max and HBO at 9 P.M. EST.

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