Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams is lining up another perfect role: Ellie in the adaptation of The Last of Us game.
While it seems Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) will have her hands full on Game of Thrones for a couple of more years (especially if they wrap up with a movie), there’s one other role she’s been campaigning for.
The Last of Us is a very popular zombie game by Naughty Dog, which follows the man Joel as he escorts the young girl Ellie across a post-apocalyptic United States.
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When the first murmur of a possible movie adaptation hit, Williams’ fans immediately bombarded Twitter with their claims that she would be perfect for the role of Ellie. And the 17-year-old actress was listening.
“I didn’t know a lot about [the game]. I Googled it,” Williams admits to IGN.
And when she discovered that Ellie’s voice actress Ashley Johnson also wanted her for the role, she decided to make a play for it.
She asked her agent to set up a meeting, and it didn’t take long before she was in a room with Sam Raimi (producer) and Neil Druckmann (game director and potential screenwriter for the movie). (Isn’t that awesome, by the way? Way to go Maisie!)
Initially, they offered that she moderate the 2014 Comic-Con panel, and although she had to decline, Raimi announced at the event that she was the frontrunner for the role.
And it looks like nothing has changed – although six months later, the team is no closer to having script. And as Williams herself points out, they need to hurry it up if they want to keep her as Ellie.
“They want me to do it, and I want to do it,” she says. “But there’s no script, no director, and no anything else. [And] if they make it in 30 years, they can’t have a 40-year-old Ellie.”
But if it happens within a few years, “it’s looking good” in terms of Williams keeping the role. “And I’d love to do it,” she adds. “Hell yeah. But it’s still such early days.”
We hope they hurry up, because Williams would undoubtedly be perfect for the role. And let’s not forget that Arya and the Hound (Rory McCann) already had a very similar adventure in Game of Thrones, so it’d almost be familiar territory!