The Last of Us Season 2: HBO Reveals Intense First Footage

HBO's The Last of Us season 2 airs in 2025 on HBO and Max.

By Cameron Bonomolo

"I can't walk on the path of the right because I'm wrong," a guitar-strumming Ellie sings in The Last of Us Part II video game. But in HBO's The Last of Us season 2 — which just dropped its first footage (below) in a trailer for what's still to come on the Max streaming service in 2024 and 2025 — it's Joel (Pedro Pascal) who has done wrong. "Did you hurt her?" Catherine O'Hara's unnamed character can be heard asking in the teaser, referring to Ellie (Bella Ramsey). "No," a tearful Joel answers. "I saved her."

The footage, which is featured alongside new looks at HBO Original Series The Penguin, The White Lotus, The Gilded Age, Dune: Prophecy, It: Welcome to Derry, and the Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, also offers a glimpse at season 2 cast members Gabriel Luna, Isabela Merced, and Jeffrey Wright, who reprises his role from the game as Isaac Dixon.

Along with Pascal and Ramsey returning as Joel and Ellie, the seven-episode second season stars series newcomers Kaitlyn Dever (No One Will Save You) as the revenge-seeking Abby, Merced (Madame Web) as Dina, Young Mazino (Beef) as Jesse, Danny Ramirez (Captain America: Brave New World) as Manny, Ariela Barer (Runaways) as Mel, Tati Gabrielle (Uncharted) as Nora, Wright (The Batman) as Isaac Dixon, and two-time Emmy winner O'Hara as an as-yet-unrevealed original character.

The first season ended with (spoiler alert) Joel killing Marlene (Merle Dandridge) and the Fireflies to save the bitten-but-immune Ellie from a brain surgery she wouldn't survive — a procedure that could potentially cure the Cordyceps infection and end the fungal apocalypse. While en route to Jackson, Wyoming, Joel lied about what happened at the hospital to Ellie, who responded with: "Okay."

"This also sets up the rest of their story in [The Last of Us Part II]. I think she sees that he's lying," Ashley Johnson, who voiced video game Ellie and played Ellie's mother on the show, explained on the official Last of Us Podcast. "And the 'okay' is like, 'Alright, we're done. You're not being truthful with me and I can't trust you.' Like, 'I love you, but this was one thing that my life would have mattered and I could have maybe made a difference somehow. And that's taken away from me now. Who I am now?'"

"'I don't know this person that I've gone on this journey with, that I care so much about, [who] is choosing to lie about something so huge,'" she continued. "And Ellie, her bulls--t detector is the best. She knows he's lying. She feels it. She doesn't know the extent of it. But somethings off. So it's like it's not choosing to believe the lie, or it's just like, 'Okay, the rest of our relationship is gonna be a little different.'"

Craig Mazin again serves as showrunner with series co-creator Neil Druckmann on The Last of Us season 2, which airs in 2025 on HBO.

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