The Last of Us season 3 cast adds John Goodman, Ian Alexander and Laura Bailey — and the game's Abby now fights for the other side
HBO's apocalypse keeps hiring the people it already replaced — and this round comes with the franchise's best inside joke yet.
The Last of Us season 3 announced three new cast members this week, and one of them arrives carrying a truly loaded suitcase. John Goodman joins as Joey and Ian Alexander as Paco — a friendly duo who call themselves "the Heroes of the Highway" — while Laura Bailey comes aboard as Elizabeth, a leader of the Seraphites, the scripture-and-scars cult at war with the WLF in Seattle.
Read that last one again if you played the game. Bailey is Abby — she voiced and performed her in The Last of Us Part II, absorbed years of genuinely vile harassment for it, and defined the most divisive character in the franchise. In the show, Abby belongs to Kaitlyn Dever, and season 3 is Abby's season. So Bailey returns to the exact same Seattle war — as a leader of the faction Abby spends the story fighting. The game's Abby will now be at war with the show's Abby, canonically, from the other trench.
Is The Creep Tapes season 3 renewed? Mark Duplass had his answer before season 2 even aired
A franchise tradition at this point
The series has made a ritual of re-hiring the game's cast in new bodies:
- Ashley Johnson, the game's Ellie, played Ellie's mother Anna
- Troy Baker, the game's Joel, showed up as James, cannibal-adjacent
- Ian Alexander is a double-dipper too — he played Lev in Part II, a role that on-screen belongs to Kyriana Kratter
- Elizabeth herself is deep-lore bait: the game references the Seraphite leader without ever putting her on screen, so the show is filling a canonical blank rather than recasting one
Bailey, for the record, carries zero bitterness about the handoff — she told Entertainment Weekly that Dever is
"just phenomenal, every moment that I saw that she was in."
And she described watching another actor inherit the role in terms that make the new casting even sweeter:
"It's kind of like watching your child get up and start walking for the first time. Once you put it out there, it's somebody else's and she's just embraced it."
The trio joins a season 3 intake that already includes Patrick Wilson, Peter Sarsgaard, Jason Ritter, Li Jun Li, and Clea DuVall. The season arrives sometime in 2027, with HBO still deciding whether the story wraps there or needs one more.
Previously we wrote: VisionQuest release date, cast and trailer: Paul Bettany's Vision is back — and so is a villain the Avengers watched die in 2015
