Season 2 of “The Last of Us” offers the first look at Kaitlyn Devers Abby in an exciting trailer

It’s time for a general television audience to meet Abby, a key character from The Last of Us Video games that players know only too well will test them emotionally.

A first look at actress Kaitlyn Dever as the character in a new The Last of Us Season 2 trailer released on Thursday to commemorate TLOU Day, the annual fan holiday that occurs on September 26th every year and is known in canon as “Outbreak Day.” The Last of UsOn the same day, the Cordyceps outbreak, which turns those infected into zombie-like monsters, reached critical mass.

HBO also released an official plot description for Season 2, which, similar to Sony and PlayStation, The Last of Us Part II video game in 2020, is quite cryptic: “After five years of peace following the events of the first season, Joel and Ellie's shared past catches up with them, embroiling them in conflict with each other and in a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind.”

Dever's Abby is described as “a seasoned soldier whose black-and-white view of the world is challenged as she seeks vengeance for those she loves.” We meet her in the story among a group of survivors that includes Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer), Nora (Tati Gabrielle) and Manny (Danny Ramirez).

The footage shows Abby in action, starting with a solemn one-shot of her crouching next to a grave. As the trailer progresses, we see Dever re-enact a classic sequence from the games where Abby runs away from a horde of infected who are holding her behind a fence.

The character became quite controversial when he was first introduced in 2020. The Last of Us Part II due to the violent reactions of the players. Further explanations would contain spoilers. The reactions were so bad that co-creator Neil Druckmann, head of the game studio Naughty Dog, said he had received death threats. Likewise, Laura Bailey, the actress who brought Abby to life, tearfully revealed in the Grounded II: The Making of The Last of Us Part II Documentary in which anonymous gamers threatened her newborn son.

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For the HBO show, Isabela Merced, who joins the cast as a new character named Dina, Happy Sad Confused Podcast that Dever “had to be given extra security protection while filming.” She said, “There are so many weird people in this world because there are people who really hate Abby even though she's not a real person. Just a reminder: not a real person.”

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, of course, reprise their roles as Joel and Ellie from season 1. They are joined by veterans of the series, which received 24 Emmy nominations and eight Emmy wins in its first round, Gabriel Luna as Joel's brother Tommy and Rutina Wesley as Maria, Tommy's wife and leader of a commune in Jackson, Wyoming.

The new additions already confirmed include Merced (Alien: Romulus) as Dina, Ellie's lover in the Jackson commune; the young Mazino (beef) as Jesse, Ellie's close friend in Jackson and Dina's ex; Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) as Isaac, the same warlord he portrayed in the video games; and Catherine O'Hara (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) as a guest star. All are prominently featured in the new footage.

While we don't yet have a name to match O'Hara's role, the trailer at least confirms that she is Joel's therapist in Jackson. He is clearly still reeling from the season one finale, in which he slaughtered the fireflies to save Ellie's life, even though it meant there would never be a cure for the plague.

“You can't heal something unless you're brave enough to say it out loud,” she tells Joel. “Say what you don't dare say. Say it out loud, no matter what it is, no matter how bad it is. What have you done?”

The Last of Us Season 2 will premiere on HBO and stream on Max sometime in 2025, courtesy of writers and executive producers Craig Mazin and Druckmann. Watch the new trailer above.