‘The Last Of Us’ follow-up star talks online backlash: “There was a lot of hate over me being a woman of colour”
Tati Gabrielle, the star of Naughty Dog’s follow-up to The Last Of Us, has opened up about the hate she’s received from gaming fans.
Earlier this year, Naughty Dog’s co-founder Neil Druckmann suggested that plans for a third The Last Of Us game had been scrapped. Instead the studio is working on a brand new project – Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
“Intergalactic stars our newest protagonist, Jordan A. Mun, a dangerous bounty hunter who ends up stranded on Sempiria – a distant planet whose communication with the outside universe went dark hundreds of years ago,” reads a synopsis.
Mun will be played by Tati Gabrielle. The actor has previously starred in the big screen adaptation of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted as Braddock and appeared in the recent season of HBO’s take on The Last Of Us as Nora.
As for her leap into the world of video games, Gabrielle confirmed that Druckmann has been “boot camp-ing” her to deal with online backlash. “I know Laura Bailey’s experience,” she said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Bailey voiced Abby in The Last Of Us Part 2 and had to deal with a lot of abuse, due to her character killing Joel in the early stages of the game.
“I got a lot of love [following the Intergalactic reveal] but there was a lot of hate over me being a woman, me being a woman of colour, me having my head shaved, all these things that I didn’t even actually initially see. I’m out of the social media zeitgeist for that reason,” Gabrielle continued. “But once I did, Neil was like, ‘Ignore it. No matter what, me and you, we’re going to make something beautiful. We’re going to make something that we’re proud of.'”
“This is a world – video games – that I’ve never stepped into before. So I don’t want to put one thing in my mind of expecting it’s going to be this way and then it’s not, and then I’m unprepared or take it too lightly,” she added.
Responding to the backlash against Bailey following the release of The Last Of Us Part 2, Druckmann said: “We have an actor, she’s been getting really awful, vile stuff because of a fictional character she’s playing in the game. I just have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. The thing I try to do is just ignore it as much as I can. When things escalate to being serious, there are certain security protocols that we take and I report it to the proper authorities.”
Kaitlyn Dever plays Abby in HBO’s The Last Of Us and has also spoken about backlash from so-called fans. “It’s hard to stop myself from looking at it every once in a while [but] my main focus was just making sure I was really getting to the core of who [Abby] is, what drives her and her emotional state; her anger and her frustration and her grief. I wanted to make sure that that was what I was focusing most of my energy on”.
In other news, Amazon Prime Video has confirmed that the second season of Fallout will be released later this year.
The post ‘The Last Of Us’ follow-up star talks online backlash: “There was a lot of hate over me being a woman of colour” appeared first on NME.
Ali Shutler
NME
