Merle Dandridge has lived with The Last of Us ending since her game audition
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Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Last of Us season 1 finale.
The ending of The Last of Us was just the beginning for Merle Dandridge.
The actress, known for roles on Station 19, The Flight Attendant, and Greenleaf, auditioned for the 2013 video game with material written for the grand finish: Marlene, the leader of the Fireflies rebel group, has to inform Joel, the smuggler she hired to transport a young girl immune to the plague that's decimated the world, that he now must let the teen die in order to save humanity. This was the first time Dandridge met Neil Druckmann, one of the game's creators, as well as Troy Baker, the actor who originated Joel.
"The words and the circumstances were slightly different, but that was my audition material," Dandridge recalls in an interview with EW. "And it's so rife with conflict and negotiation and, ultimately, resolve. There's a sense of letting her vulnerability be seen perhaps as a negotiating tool, but there are so many different layers that you get to see of Marlene in that scene."
Dandridge, obviously, got the job. And now, more than a decade later, she received the opportunity to approach this same sequence, which became such a lightning rod among gamers at the time, in a different light. Reprising Marlene in live action on HBO's adaptation of The Last of Us, Dandridge offers different shades to her character and to the circumstances with Pedro Pascal, the actor behind the new incarnation of Joel.
"I was really excited to explore that and mine something new and perhaps even more heartbreaking from it," she says.
Liane Hentscher/HBO; Naughty Dog Merle Dandridge as Marlene in 'The Last of Us' series versus Marlene in the game
The premise remains largely the same from game to show. Having endured and survived her traumatic encounter with David (Scott Shepherd), a religious fanatic and pedophile, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is determined to find purpose amid so much loss. Joel, calling her "baby girl" for the first time, no longer sees her as cargo but as a surrogate daughter.
They reach Salt Lake City, where the Fireflies have turned a local hospital into their base. The two are separated, and when Joel demands to see Ellie, Marlene tells him Ellie's being prepped for surgery. The Fireflies' surgeon is preparing to remove the mutated cordyceps from her brain in order to engineer a vaccine, but there's a cost. Removing the fungus, which has grown with Ellie since birth, will result in her death.
The circumstances are made more tragic by the sequence that opened the episode. A flashback takes us to the birth of Ellie, where her mom, Anna (played by original Ellie actor Ashley Johnson), a lifelong friend of Marlene's, is attacked by an Infected while she's in labor. She kills the creature, but she's been bitten. It's presumed the cordyceps transferred to Ellie before Anna could cut the umbilical cord. When Marlene arrives, Anna begs her to take Ellie to Boston with their group and to look after her. She also asks her friend to kill her before she can turn.
This sequence isn't dramatized in the source material, though scraps of information exist in the form of diary entries, notes, and audio recordings the player can discover. Dandridge had most of this background when making the game.
"I've known the kind of relationship that Marlene and Anna have had. Those are things that are the foundations on which I built my original Marlene experience, because there has to be an emotional reason for all of this to have those kind of heightened stakes," she says. "I have imagined those scenarios around Anna in so many different ways, but to actually be able to act them out, to have these beautiful words to say, and to have a dear old friend to play them out with, it was really, really wonderful."
She didn't, however, know that Marlene was the one to kill Anna. "That never occurred to me," she adds. "That was another big gut punch."
Liane Hentscher/HBO Merle Dandridge reunites with fellow game veteran Ashley Johnson in 'The Last of Us' season 1 finale
Dandridge's performance in The Last of Us finale becomes all the more richer for this backstory. You can read the history on Marlene's face as Joel argues to save Ellie. In the subtleties Dandridge provides when taking a deep breath or closing her eyes for just a moment, the audience can sense everything she's had to personally sacrifice for what she perceives to be the greater good, and the toll it's taken on her. Freed from the motion-capture hardware required for games and situated in a fully realized post-apocalyptic world, she's able to be present in a way she couldn't be the last time she performed this scene.
"I would venture to say I needed to approach the whole thing differently except for my understanding of [Marlene]," Dandridge explains. "The work of who she is, where she comes from, what she would and wouldn't do and why... [it's] the work of building an interesting and beautiful character, and those things I've lived with for quite some time." (The actress, for example, always thought that Marlene and Tommy had a romantic entanglement in Boston. "Without a doubt. There was a thing 100 percent," she says.) "But there were adjustments to be made in this framework," she continues. "I can't stress enough the astonishment of walking into the world that you have been imagining for so long to actually touch, smell, interact in real time with."
A decade later, Dandridge has come to understand Marlene in a different light thanks to the benefit of hindsight, a new medium, and new life experiences, the most obvious being the parallel of the real-world pandemic through which we all collectively suffered. It's why she sees The Last of Us game's ending — and now the season 1 finale — as such ripe water cooler conversation. It's bound to be divisive, and interpretations will likely change over time.
To this day, Dandridge finds Marlene's dilemma uniquely painful. "Marlene is a soldier. She's a survivalist. She is trying to do better for the whole. That is in direct opposition with her heart, and actually maybe the only thing left of her life before," she says. "She had love and friendship and family. That was something other than [being] a soldier. To be asked to sacrifice that one last shred of who she was is extraordinarily painful. I ache for her for that. But she does very much believe she is doing the right thing."
"Does Merle think she's doing the right thing?" she posits. "Golly, I couldn't even venture to put myself in her shoes."
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