The Last of Us star Storm Reid, who plays the childhood friend of Bella Ramsey’s Ellie in HBO’s video game adaptation, has reflected on her time filming the show.
The actor, 19, who is also known for playing the sister of Zendaya’s Rue in Euphoria, is the focal point of The Last of Us’s seventh episode.
***Warning: spoilers ahead***
In episode seven, the story goes back in time to when Ellie and Riley (Reid) were at a Fedra military boarding school together.
Riley goes missing for a while, before coming back to tell Ellie that she has joined rebel group Fireflies.
The pair spend the night in an abandoned shopping mall, riding on the carousel and playing arcade games.
At one point, the best friends kiss, and dance together on a counter top. But these are their last moments of happiness together before they are attacked by the Infected.
They manage to survive the attack, but both realise they have been bitten. Having only just shown their true feelings for one another, they are left with the prospect of becoming infected themselves.
“The kiss scene and dance scene are loved by the video game players, and I’m honoured and privileged to play a young Black woman who’s queer and exploring those feelings and trying to figure out her relationship with her best friend,” she told The Independent. “It’s so beautiful.”
She added: “And the dancing as well, it’s just them being kids, them having fun and being very intimate together, which we didn’t see much of in the past couple of episodes, this perspective of young people and how they feel about each other and their circumstances. It’s really refreshing and fun to see.”
The Last of Us’s cinematographer Eben Bolter recently revealed that the word zombies was essentially banned on set, but Reid said she didn’t know about this rule. “That wasn’t something that I was really aware of,” she said.
“I don’t think we were too much worried about any of that. We were just trying to create beautiful art about a post-apocalyptic world.”
