Craig Mazin, the creator of Chernobyl and The Last of Us, addressed the online backlash against the casting of the latter. Mazin was speaking at Indian Film Project's event in Mumbai.
"I think everybody was probably a bit surprised by the extent of what happened there. It was kind of a perfect storm when that video game came out because it was in the midst of the pandemic. It was coming shortly after the kind of supernova of Gamergate, which was a cultural shift and created a lot of online rhetoric, I guess I’ll put it in the most polite terms. And then there was a leak, and the leak was sort of a bit confusing,” said Mazin, referencing to Gamergate, the controversy of 2014, which prompted a wave of misogynistic actions online.
Speaking about the comments, which were also prompted due to assumptions on Abby's casting, Mazin said, "I felt terrible for Neil Druckmann, for all the people at Naughty Dog, and for the actors who were getting a lot of hatred, which is crazy. To yell at actors for a character they portray is insane."
But Mazin remained optimistic and said, "When it comes to The Last of Us, we’ve connected with tens of millions of people around the world. So I’ll sort of keep aiming at those people, I guess, and hopefully make them happy."
The Last of Us is an adaptation of the video game of the same name, which is created by Neil Druckmann under his Naughty Dog studio. Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, and Kaitlyn Dever star as Joel, Ellie, and Abby, the leads, whose lives become entangled in the dystopian world filled with zombie-like creatures.
