For some reason, the casting for games-turned-movies/series is always really daft. The Last of Us as a game was pretty great in its representation of minorities and LGBT+ representation, but this doesn’t translate in the casting very well because the characters they chose to represent are a limited few.

I love Pedro Pascal, he’s a great actor, but I feel like they could have really made better choices in likeness for Joel the big Texan tough-and-quiet type. The same applies to Ellie. Again, no issue in particular with the actors/actresses, that’s part of the great thing about acting - they can “become” the characters on screen, but it really doesn’t sit well with fans when those characters have already been fleshed out in the game.

This is part of the reason the majority of fans of the Uncharted games were so irked by the casting of the movie. We just can’t see Tom Holland as Nathan Drake or Mark Wahlberg as Sully, the translation is just poor not because those actors aren’t good at their job but because they lack the traits of delivering the fleshed character. I personally would have preferred less known actors who fit the roles better- an older actor with Sully’s typical wit or an actual middle aged actor who could deliver Drake’s smartass remarks without sounding childish.

Your thread does raise an issue of curiosity in me though… The Last of Us has no main black characters who aren’t villains. We see Riley, Marlene, Sam, Harry, Nora, and Isaac but in all of these the characters are dead and 3 of them are villains. Why couldn’t a character like Ellie or Joel be black? Would the reception of the game have been different if Joel was black? And if so, what does that say about society?

Funnily enough, I was raising the issue of a lack of black protagonists in video games to a friend just the other day. I was saying that I saw no reason why a main character can’t be black without being stereotyped into a gang violence based game like GTA and it’s a shame!