So far, a lot of the talk around The Last of Us’ second season TV cast has been focused on Kaitlyn Dever as Abby Anderson. It makes a lot of sense – Abby is by far the most important new character to be joining the cast, and her defining feature (her bulging muscles) have not made the transition to live action. My colleague Tessa Kaur and I have already argued the pros and cons of this, but I am fickle – Tessa’s view that it will not matter in the end may well prove right.
However, there’s another extremely interesting (and potentially controversial) casting choice with a significant departure from the game’s lore: Isabela Merced as Dina. At first glance, it’s great casting – both have a similar skin tone, eye colour, and have thick, black hair, while Merced’s best known role (Alien: Romulus) even involves her playing a pregnant woman in a violent world where she must rely on a short, vengeful young woman for salvation. But there’s a key change made by casting Merced – what does it mean for Dina’s Jewishness?
The Last Of Us And Its Controversial Religious History
There are two extremely delicate issues to balance here. Firstly, The Last of Us has, to put it mildly, a controversial connection to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. Neil Druckmann, the series creator, grew up in Israel and has spoken of how the violence he witnessed during his time there, and the empty anger it generated within him, motivated his exploration of vengeance in The Last of Us Part 2.
Comparisons have been drawn between the WLF (advanced, civilised settlers with a modern society, each with individual names right down to the dogs) and the Seraphites (religiously cloistered, ignorant natives who do not accept a peaceful ‘two state solution’, mostly unnamed and covered in robes) to Israel and Palestine, with Druckmann in particular criticised for this heavy-handed view of geopolitics.
Given tensions have escalated since TLOU2 first released into outright war and it has become a hot button public relations issue, I expect the HBO series will swerve any allegories for the conflict as best it can. It may be that, as part of this, Dina’s own religion was written out of the show to avoid highlighting that controversy. Given the game also revolves around saving a trans boy from a society that does not accept him, another issue that has set alight in the five years since the game launched, The Last of Us can pick its battles, but inevitably it will need to fight some, hard.
The second delicate issue comes from the assumption itself. We know Merced is not ethnically Jewish, while in the game, Dina is (as is her face model Cascina Caradonna). Merced has been private about what religion she has, if any, but a quick glance at her family history online shows she was raised Catholic – which makes sense as Merced considers herself Peruvian because of her mother’s family, despite being born in Cleveland, and Peru’s population is 80 percent Catholic.
None of that means she couldn’t play a Jewish person, but the decision to cast someone who resembles Dina aesthetically but has a markedly different ethnicity feels like a deliberate choice to reframe her character.
Dina’s Jewishness Is Crucial To The Last Of Us
If that’s the case, it’s disappointing for a couple of reasons. Faith is an under explored element of The Last of Us. We have the Seraphites, a new cultish religion to signify the end of days, but The Last of Us does not exist in a world so removed from our own. People still know Pearl Jam and Jurassic Park. Religion will have endured. In many cases, tragedy only makes faith stronger. While understandably a sensitive topic politically, the expansive nature of HBO’s show could have meant more time given to religious themes, while this casting feels like a signal there will be less.
It also means removing one of my favourite scenes in The Last of Us Part 2, where Ellie and Dina explore the synagogue. It was a spectacular building, and it underlined the idea of endure and survive – a building that had stood for decades, seeped in thousands of years of human tradition, still here. Outlasting everything. The Last of Us is a very metaphorical experience at times, but I don’t think anything is as subtle nor as powerful as Dina walking around the synagogue and feeling all the lives she could have lived, and all the lives lived before her, simultaneously weigh her down and lift her up.
You could have the same sort of scene with a Catholic cathedral if Dina was reshaped to Merced’s own past, and as someone raised Catholic myself that scene might hit me personally even harder. But the specific Jewishness of Dina’s character was not only obviously so personal to Druckmann, but also called to mind ideas of suffering, surviving, and wandering. Dina is not a religious character in a religious building, she is specifically a Jewish woman in a synagogue, with all that that represents, and I don’t think you can just tag in another religion that you hope plays better for a key viewer demographic.
Dina is one of my favourite characters in The Last of Us Part 2, her relationship with Ellie is key to what makes the game’s narrative so heartbreaking, and Merced is a great young actor who has already shown a great deal of range in her short filmography. There are still enough things to get me excited for The Last of Us season two. But to change Dina is to lose Dina, and I’m curious how her character endures and survives the journey to television.