The Season 1 finale of HBO’s The Last of Us contains a secret cameo tied to The Last of Us Part II that many fans of the video game series surely missed. As a whole, The Last of Us TV series brought back a number of different actors from the games such as Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, Jeffrey Pierce, and Merle Dandridge. And while most of these people ended up playing different roles in the show, this cameo was one that saw the actress in question playing the same part once again.ย
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Who Makes a Cameo in The Last of Us Episode 9?
In the final moments of Episode 9 of The Last of Us, the actress Laura Bailey briefly appears as a nameless character in the show. Bailey is most well-known to The Last of Us fans for playing the character Abby in The Last of Us Part II. Without saying too much about Abby, she is a character that is introduced in Part II and ends up having a massive impact on where the game’s story ends up going.ย
Rather than playing Abby within HBO’s The Last of Us, though, Bailey merely fills the role of a nurse within the hospital sequence near the end of the episode. Bailey is hidden behind a mask during her appearance, so this is a cameo that would have been almost impossible to spot on its own. When looking at the show’s credits, however, Bailey is mentioned as one of the actresses that played one of the two nurses seen in the episode.ย
How Did This Cameo Come to Be?
In a press conference prior to the airing of the season finale of The Last of Us, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann shed a bit of light on how Bailey’s involvement came to be. In short, Mazin explained that Bailey kept asking to be featured in The Last of Us in some capacity. As luck would have it, when Episode 9 was filming, Mazin and the crew found a way to squeeze in Bailey by having her play a nondescript nurse.ย
What makes this cameo even funnier is that Druckmann, who directed both video game installments, said that Bailey played the same role in the original The Last of Us. While she went on to later star as Abby in The Last of Us Part II, Bailey also played the motion capture role of one of the nurses in the first game. As such, for her to play this small part once again in the TV adaptation was a full-circle moment for Bailey and makes the show that much more similar to the source material.ย
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