The Last of Us

Liane Hentscher/HBO

HBO’s The Last of Us has generally been faithful to the books, but there have been some significant changes over the course of the first two seasons, and it seems like there’s going to be one more to come. A big actor is showing up to play a villain that did not originally appear in The Last of Us Part II at all.

Peter Sarsgaard has been cast in season 3 of The Last of Us as Amon, one of the Seraphite leaders, one who did not appear in the game. The original leader of the Seraphites was “The Prophet,” but she was executed by the WLF’s Isaac after her capture. I imagine that Amon may serve as more of a singular “face” for the cult, as there wasn’t all that much of a central character who was the leader in the original game.

In the game and the upcoming show, the Seraphites are a faction at war with the WLF. The cult wants to live off the land and not rely on any technology in the apocalypse, and believes the Cordyceps brain infection was a punishment from God for the world’s sins. In the wake of the death of The Prophet, the war against the WLF escalated.

The show has already taken one non-game detour here with Ellie being introduced to the cult and its brutality in a scene that wasn’t in the game at all, presumably setting them up for the third season in addition to the captured one tortured by Isaac in a different sequence.

Season 3 of The Last of Us will focus mainly on Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby, and she has many, many run-ins with the Seraphites. Her main storyline has her joining two members attempting to flee the cult, Lev and Yara, where Lev was persecuted by the cult for being trans.

It’s likely that Sarsgaard is one of the Elders who took over for The Prophet after her death, putting a known face on the villainous organization. Sarsgaard is no stranger to playing villains, as he did in The Magnificent Seven, Green Lantern, Knight and Day and Flightplan, among others, as those are just the blockbusters. So he’ll fit right in here.

Sarsgaard's casting is happening as The Last of Us is on hiatus for a month, coinciding with the World Cup, as it films in Vancouver, one of the event’s host cities. The show will resume filming after that, but once again, it’s looking like an extremely long gap between seasons, as was the case between seasons 1 and 2, which had a two-year space between them. This could reach beyond that. It’s rumored that the Abby-focused season 3 could be the last of the series, but that’s not confirmed, and there’s still a lot of game to get through between her chapters and then the conflict between her and Ellie afterward, including an entire flash-forward segment in an entirely different state. We’ll see how that’s handled and how long Sarsgaard may be in the show.

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