Bella Ramsey Interviewed About Surviving Season 2

Bella Ramsey decided to treat the day like any other: Eat some oatmeal, listen to some music, go to hair and makeup — and then watch Pedro Pascal get beaten to death with a golf club.

“I almost went too far and made it too normal and pretended it wasn’t happening right up until the moment where it did happen,” Ramsey recalls. “That’s how I approach scenes like that. If I think about it too much, then I’ve got too much anxiety and stress about it.”

Besides, Ramsey figured, their The Last of Us character — the strong yet stubborn apocalypse survivor Ellie — didn’t have a chance to mentally brace herself before seeing her beloved surrogate father figure, Joel (played by Pascal), get violently murdered. So when the moment finally came, with Ramsey sobbing and pinned to the floor, “It just all came out.”

Ramsey wasn’t the only one weeping. Emmy-winning director Mark Mylod, a veteran of Game of Thrones and Succession, had spent months preparing to shoot the complicated sequence and assumed he would be immune to his actors’ emoting. “By the time we get to the day, I’m so prepped and I’ve run the moment so many times in my head, but Bella took it to a level where I was just destroyed,” Mylod recalls. “It’s difficult to think, ‘It’s just acting,’ because it was transcending that.”

Yet for Ramsey, it was a relatively easy day on what was otherwise an utterly grueling shoot. “The most intense scenes to shoot are often the easiest for me because I know exactly what that scene needs to be,” Ramsey says. 

The British actor had been anticipating this particular moment since they were cast on the heels of their breakout role in HBO’s Game of Thrones, where Ramsey played the scene-stealing Lyanna Mormont (a character that so effectively popped off the screen that the showrunners kept adding more for Ramsey to do). Ramsey’s performance during first season of The Last of Us — which boasted HBO’s highest-rated premiere since Thrones — earned them an Emmy nomination.

Season two is based on PlayStation’s 2020 game The Last of Us Part II, which likewise traumatized players with Joel’s sadistic execution and was considered a divisive title — not just because of the murder but because players were suddenly shifted from playing a traditionally heroic male video game character to playing a young lesbian. Developed by The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann, the creative shake-up was a bold move amid a game that continually found ways to challenge the player’s assumptions and perspective.

“The point of this story is that the entire concept of protagonist is flawed,” explains showrunner Craig Mazin. “The entire concept of villain is flawed. Our way of processing the world through heroes and villains is a mistake. It ends up creating these barriers between people that shouldn’t be there.”

For Ramsey, who has explored their own identity — coming out as non-binary when promoting the show’s first season (Ramsey has said they don’t much care which pronouns are used, but “they/them” is “the most truthful thing for me”) — the beating sequence marked some major personal shifts. First, it was the beginning of saying a workplace goodbye to Pascal, with whom they formed an extraordinarily close bond across two seasons of filming in British Columbia. (When asked who among the show’s cast and crew they would want to be stuck in an elevator with, Ramsey doesn’t hesitate: “Pedro.”)

“Understanding [from the show’s outset] the limited time me and Pedro have together has made us really cherish each other more,” Ramsey says. “It was something that we got quite emotional about while we were shooting. We’ll be in each other’s lives forever, and we’ll be in each other’s hearts forever.”

Another shift was that Ramsey became the show’s sole star. The 21-year-old has been open about their struggles with anxiety and recently revealed they were diagnosed with autism while filming the show’s first season. Playing the physically and mentally taxing part of Ellie was already demanding enough before the added responsibility was placed on Ramsey’s shoulders. But the actor has never been afraid to step up, whether onscreen or off.

An avid environmentalist, Ramsey has a “green rider” in their contract. Typical celebrity riders make demands related to an actor’s comfort — such as a swank trailer, high-quality food and luxurious accommodations and transportation. A green rider is less self-serving but more ambitious — requiring sets to embrace across-the-board sustainability (such as using electric vehicles and reducing food and material waste). “It covers every department, and the producers have to adhere to certain things and so does the actor,” Ramsey explains. “Both parties have to be accountable for being sustainability-conscious throughout the shoot. Making sustainable choices on set should be built into the very fabric of the production because it’s not that difficult.”

A push for sustainable choices is particularly appropriate on The Last of Us, a show whose very first scene suggested that the apocalyptic plague unleashed on humanity was due to global warming. Still, becoming the show’s top-billed star took Ramsey to another level.

“I would never consider myself a leader,” Ramsey says. “But there’s something that happens when I’m given responsibility where I really like the feeling and I take the responsibility very seriously. I’m very happy to lead a set and have a lot of influence over the tone and dynamic, especially given there’s preconceived ideas about a young person who’s No. 1 on the call sheet.”

For Ramsey, this meant trying to tear down workplace hierarchy — making sure that everybody felt comfortable and welcome, seen and heard. “Because I’ve been in so many situations in my life and conversations where that hasn’t been done for me,” Ramsey says. While Ramsey doesn’t specify any job experiences here, they quit the series The Worst Witch after three seasons in 2019, later saying they developed an eating disorder while filming and wanted a change of environment. “Everybody should know they’re valued as a crewmember, as a castmember, and that we’re all equals,” Ramsey says.

Yet season two was “a very difficult year” for the actor, “in many, many ways.” The story picks up five years after the events in the first season, which aired in 2023. In the game, Ellie is dramatically physically transformed in Part II — which is easy enough to do when painting a digital figure, less so if you’re an actual human.

Ramsey was put through intensive physical training, such as boxing, jiujitsu and weight training. Once filming began, Ramsey alternated between shooting and stunt training — their work, in other words, was nonstop. The efforts allowed Ramsey to incarnate a tougher, more assured Ellie.

“It was cool to feel really … capable,” Ramsey says. “But I got quite fixated on the way that Ellie looks in the game and her physical stature and, to be specific, the muscle definition in her arms. And I didn’t look like that. My body type isn’t that. I talked about this a lot with Craig, and he never put that expectation on me. He wanted me to look strong and feel strong, and that was in how I carried myself, my posture and the confidence you have. It was a challenge for me to let myself off the hook for not looking computer-generated.”

Not helping matters was the fact that the game character’s metamorphosis versus real-life Ramsey has been a point of obsessive fixation among fans online. Even a casual dive into X and Reddit can uncover next-level cruelty aimed at the actor for not meeting their unrealistic expectations. A few months ago, Ramsey deactivated their social media accounts. “I always knew that I’d [deactivate] it one day and never even really wanted to have social media in the first place,” Ramsey says. “It wasn’t like this big dramatic thing, but there was an element of it that was thinking about the show coming out for season two. If I just avoid Twitter and Reddit, which now I’m doing, then everything’s totally fine.”

Yet watching the season, Ramsey has greatly evolved, in many ways. The episodes call for Ramsey to play just about every possible note — from comedy to horror to action to romance (and also learn literal notes, as they have to play guitar and sing). As Mazin puts it, “I’m not interested in the physical aspect, I’m interested in the emotional maturity and the change in personality. I’ve watched Bella grow and start to find her own two feet. … And I feel that in Ellie completely.”

Or, as Pascal puts it, “The evolution of Bella’s Ellie from season one to season two reflects their own development of independence. It isn’t an independence learned or formed, but one that was always there and given permission from themself to live freely.”

There are scenes to come in the season — with one in particular that we won’t spoil — where Ramsey stuns. “I was scared of her, and I didn’t like her, and I didn’t want her to do what she’s doing,” Mazin says, recalling when the moment was shot. “I look at her, and she’s breaking my heart. I’m just like …” Mazin trails off, marveling. “I’m telling you, Bella Ramsey.”

It was from chatting with Mazin during the first season that Ramsey discovered they were autistic. “Craig has an autistic kid, and so we were talking about that,” they recalled. “And Craig and I share quite a similar brain in a lot of ways. He would talk about it as if we already knew that he was on the spectrum somewhere, and that I probably was too. I was like, ‘Huh, cool. I better get this checked out.’ And then I did, and it was a great feeling.”

The diagnosis explained why Ramsey struggled during certain situations, and it enabled the actor, as they eloquently put it to British Vogue, “to walk through the world with more grace towards myself about not being able to do the easy everyday tasks that everyone else seems to be able to do.”

So much of The Last of Us season two takes place in extreme environments, with Ramsey cold, wet and muddy. Sensory hypersensitivity can be a nightmare for an autistic actor. “Having to wear the waterproofs underneath my costume was absolutely atrocious,” Ramsey says. “I’d have to make light of it on set because otherwise I was going to go insane. We’d say, ‘Oh, I’m tweaking.’ I had to try and pretend that it wasn’t happening and distract myself, but sometimes I’d literally rip off my waterproofs at lunchtime. Being tired for me also always amplifies my autistic traits. That was a challenge, as the months went on.”

Yet Ramsey’s toughest scene wasn’t fighting or swimming or being cold or miserable, but a deceptively simple shot from next week’s episode where Ellie weeps over the loss of Joel. “I really struggle with crying in scenes. I can get a tear out, but that’s different than crying.” What eventually worked, Ramsey recalled, was a bit ironic. “I remembered the happiest of memories that I’ve had with Pedro,” Ramsey says. “The thing that is always the saddest to me is remembering the happy things. I was remembering us the first few times we met and shooting season one. I was remembering all of that and through the lens of losing him.”

For an actor who sometimes feels like they’re carrying the weight of the world when at work, Ramsey also cares an enormous amount about sustainability when off the clock. Talking about the topic with Ramsey doesn’t go like you might expect — there’s no Greta Thunberg-style self-righteousness or data dumping, just the earnest concern of one young actor trying to do what they can to make things better.

Ramsey got “green pilled” fairly young when they started to question why summers were getting hotter in their native U.K. and there was less snow in the winter. “I’ve only been alive 21 years and I’ve noticed such a shift with the effects of climate change,” they note. They went on to study environmental science via the U.K.’s Open University.

Hollywood, Ramsey believes, isn’t doing enough on this front despite its ultra-progressive reputation. “I come to L.A. and I see fridges full of plastic water bottles and I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” they say. “It’s bizarre to me. I don’t know if any industry is particularly doing enough, but Hollywood is an industry which has a lot of influence.”

The return of Donald Trump to the White House and with it his orders withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and targeting state and local climate laws are “quite terrifying,” Ramsey says. “Can I swear in this [story]? We’re fucking ourselves over. The planet will be OK. We won’t be.”

When I point out that many feel rather hopeless on this subject — that too many people seem too wired for short-term gratification to make the sort of global changes necessary to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, Ramsey replies: “I understand the feeling of hopelessness, and I’ve also felt it. But I think that a way of wrestling with that is to implement the small changes in your own life. And if the big policymakers aren’t going to do anything, at least we, as a global community, can try. And with all of these small changes that we make, millions of small changes have a large impact.”

Ramsey, of course, isn’t only fixated on acting and advocacy. When not on set, they’re often doing “normal day-to-day stuff.” They shop. They hang out with friends. They love rock climbing (indoor climbing or outdoor bouldering). So long as they are, you know, doing something. “I’m not somebody who can lay in bed and do nothing,” Ramsey says.

And with their The Last of Us duties coming to an end sooner than fans might like (Mazin has said the show — which recently was renewed for a third season — will end either next season or with season four), Ramsey is considering what might come next.

“I haven’t got any specific ideas in mind, but I just want to make sure that the future characters I play feel different to Ellie,” Ramsey says. “Not because I don’t love playing Ellie, but I want to have a new challenge. I want to be scared of a project and a character and not know whether I can do it — that’s the dream.”

This story appears in the April 2025 Sustainability digital issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to see the rest of the issue.