In ‘The Last of Us,’ Bella Ramsey Might Save the World

Now, if she sees “nonbinary” as an option on a form, she will tick it. “I’m very much just a person,” she said. “Being gendered isn’t something that I particularly like, but in terms of pronouns, I really couldn’t care less.”

Ramsey has used her art to help her process other aspects of her life. She returned recently to a film script she began when she was 14, a project inspired partly by her own experience with anorexia nervosa. (In 2018, Ramsey posted on social media about her diagnosis and the part religion played in her recovery, though her relationship with faith is “a lot quieter” today, she said.) The script, which has “developed and matured” over the past five years, she said, is about a teenage girl living with an eating disorder and the “imperfect relationships and complicated people” she surrounds herself with.

Ramsey asked some past collaborators to read an early draft, and one person who did was the Oscar-nominated actor and filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg, a co-star in the 2020 war drama “Resistance.” In a phone interview, Eisenberg said the script was “insightful and written with great emotional depth.” What strikes him about Ramsey, he said, is that she exhibits “her generation’s thoughtfulness, but on the other hand she seems to have this amazing self awareness too.”

“Bella is like a Rosetta stone for young people,” he added.

Ramsey has never been much of a gamer, but she was aware of “The Last of Us” when her agent emailed an audition script and Ellie’s character description. She was immediately drawn to the role, she said, and felt attached to Ellie “for reasons I couldn’t describe.”

After Ramsey won the part, Druckmann and Mazin advised her not to play the game in order to prepare. Instead, the actor watched YouTube clips of significant gameplay scenes, she said, in order “to feel confident that the Ellie I felt inside of me, under my skin, was the right one.”