AINEWS
The Last of Us Season 3 Adds Peter Sarsgaard as a Character Who Exists Only in the Show
Amon is one of several original characters HBO is building into a season told from Abby's perspective.
Amon is one of several original characters HBO is building into a season told from Abby's perspective.
The Last of Us has given a recurring role in season 3 to Peter Sarsgaard, playing a Seraphite leader named Amon. The casting is its own news, but the part HBO built for Sarsgaard is the more interesting one. Amon does not exist in either of Naughty Dog's games, and he has no arc waiting for him in the source fiction. He is a construction, made for a season the writers have organized around a perspective the show has only ever glanced at: Abby's.
Season 3 will run concurrently with season 2's events but from Abby's point of view, played by Kaitlyn Dever, as reported by Deadline and relayed by Gizmodo. Abby is a former Firefly who joined the Washington Liberation Front, the WLF, after Joel killed the Fireflies at the Salt Lake City hospital. The WLF and the Seraphites are at war for control of Seattle, and that factional fight is the structural spine of the season. Amon, as a Seraphite leader, sits on the opposite side of that war from Abby. He is built to be a counterpart, and probably an antagonist, for the perspective the show is finally putting on screen.
That is what makes the casting matter beyond the casting notice. The writers are not just translating the games. They are using the shift to Abby to populate Seattle with characters the source material never produced. Amon is the most prominent example, but the pattern shows up in the other casting already announced. Jason Ritter has been cast as Hanley, a WLF soldier who also does not appear in the games, per the same reporting, putting another original figure on Abby's side of the conflict. Patrick Wilson is playing Jerry, Abby's father, in flashbacks. Jerry exists in the games as a Firefly surgeon, but the show is reportedly giving him more screen time and a more developed interior life than the source ever did. Each of these roles widens a season whose point of view is wider than the show has attempted before.
Abby has been a known quantity to viewers of the games for years, and to viewers of the show since season 2. The show, though, has been slow to give her real estate. Season 3 reads as a corrective, with the writers using the opportunity to build a Seattle the games only sketched. The Seraphites in particular are a faction with rich game lore, including ritual scarification, a theocratic internal structure, and a brutal guerrilla war with the WLF, and the show has so far had little room to render any of that on screen. Amon is the figure the writers are inserting to make that rendering possible.
What HBO does with Amon specifically is still mostly speculation. Filming is already underway, which means the answers will be visible soon, and the choices will be specific: how much of the Seraphite aesthetic the show carries over, how much it reinvents for a character who only exists in the writers' room, and how much room Amon is given to push back on Abby rather than simply stand in her way. The interesting question is not whether the show invents characters the games never made. It already does. The question is whether those inventions give Abby's side of the story room to breathe, or whether the new figures end up crowding out the perspective the season is built to deliver.