The Last of Us is nearly back with its second season, and after more than three years between Season 1’s finale and the April 13th premiere, fans have plenty to look forward to with the arrival of several new characters including Isabela Merced‘s Dina, Young Mazino‘s Jesse, and Kaitlyn Dever‘s Abby.
Players of The Last of Us Part II, the video game upon which the latest chapter’s storyline is based, will likely recognize these names, but for fans of the HBO series alone, this is all new territory. In anticipation of Season 2’s debut, TV Insider caught up with Merced, Mazino, and Dever to delve deeper into what viewers can anticipate from the arrival of their characters in this latest chapter.
“There’s a lot more context,” teases Dever of her character Abby, who is a soldier seeking vengeance. “There’s a lot more lead-up to her character and her storyline… in the show, we go a lot deeper with her character, emotionally speaking,” she adds. “And I think that that’s very exciting to get to sort of bring to life a video game character that has such an intense presence.”
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Abby makes a strong impression early on in the show’s second season, just as Dina and Jesse do, living in Jackson, Wyoming, where Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) have settled in the five years between Season 1’s ending and where the story is picking up now.
“Dina is the fun, outgoing person that you might perceive her to be,” Merced shares about her character, who is close with Ellie. “However, she has much darker stories to tell and a darker side to her that will probably make her more well-rounded and vulnerable as the series goes on,” she teases.
Jesse, Dina’s ex and friend of Ellie, is also entangled in their lives, overseeing patrols and serving as a pillar of the Jackson community. Still, one fun detail Mazino thinks viewers should know about his character is “I think Jesse is secretly a stoner, but he doesn’t let anyone know that he is, and there’s some context when you watch the show,” he teases.
As viewers get a look into the lives of Ellie, Joel, Dina, Jesse, and more in Jackson, Abby poses a threat to their relative peace, but at the same time, Dever couldn’t have felt more welcomed and embraced by the team. “It was like a warm hug,” Dever says. “I was going through a lot personally when I first started this show, and I’ve never felt so cared for and carried in my life by a group of people that I was working with,” she adds. “In my career, I’ve never experienced this kind of support before.”
Don’t miss these new additions when they arrive on The Last of Us, and let us know who you’re looking forward to seeing onscreen in the comments section below.
The Last of Us, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, April 13, 9/8c, HBO and Max