Back in October, Game of Thrones actress Maisie Williams confirmed that she’d had talks about starring in a movie based on the hit survival horror game The Last of Us. While we haven’t received much in the way of updates on the project — or her potential starring role in it — Williams recently indicated that things are indeed moving along in a positive direction.
“At this moment, it’s looking like, ‘Yes,’ but it’s still such early days,” Williams told IGN about the status of the film. “If they make it in 30 years, they can’t have a 40-year-old Ellie. So at the moment, it’s looking good, and I’d love to do it. Hell yeah.”
The 17-year-old actress, who’s best-known for playing Arya Stark on the popular HBO series, also offered some insight about the surprise mention of her name at San Diego Comic-Con this year when producer Sam Raimi and The Last of Us game director Neil Druckmann were discussing the film during a panel. Williams confessed that she hadn’t heard of the game until people started mentioning her as a potential lead for a live-action adaptation, and she then had her agent contact the movie’s creative team to express her interest.
“I had a meeting with Sam Raimi and Neil Druckmann,” said Williams. “They said they’d love ‘if you would moderate the panel at Comic-Con, but you’d need to watch the walk-through and know your shit because there are massive fans of this and we wouldn’t want it to go wrong.'”
“I was doing so much work for Thrones that I didn’t want to half-arse do it,” she explained. “So I said I’m not going to [moderate]. They said fine, but they’re going to announce they had talks [with me]. So the way it was left is they want me to do it, and I want to do it. But there’s no script, no director, and no anything else.”
While there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of movement on the film, it certainly seems as if Williams is all but assured of landing the role if cameras begin rolling in the near future. Druckmann is currently writing the screenplay for the film, which follows a young girl and a battle-hardened survivor as they navigate the country 20 years after a frightening epidemic has turned much of the human population into monstrous creatures.
