From Converse to Converts: How “The Last of Us” Costume Designer Ann Foley Mapped Ellie’s Dark Journey Toward Vengeance

In a world decimated by zombies, human survivors don’t have much time to worry about fashion, which explains why form follows function in The Last of Us. In the HBO Max drama, which concluded its shocking second season with a May 25 finale, characters primarily focus on staying warm and as dry as possible. Most of our major players in season two had two goals: revenge and killing any of the infected who got in their way. But even a no-frills wardrobe aesthetic requires world-building expertise, so showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann enlisted costume designer Ann Foley to call the post-apocalyptic sartorial shots.

A Georgia native with formidable credits, including the 2021 blockbuster Godzilla vs. Kong, Foley only decided to become a costume designer after she visited the set of 1969 as a college student when the Robert Downey Jr. movie was being filmed in Savannah. “I was blown away,” she tells The Credits. “Until then, I didn’t even know costume designer was a thing. Much to my mother’s dismay, I told her, ‘I’m moving to L.A. ‘ I arrived in Los Angeles with one phone number and $500.”

Since then, she’s designed wardrobes for The Spiderwick Chronicles, She-Hulk, and Dwayne Johnson’s Skyscraper. For The Last of Us Season 2, she immersed herself in the eponymous video game to develop outfits for characters Ellie (Bella Ramsey), her girlfriend Dina (Isabela Merced), father figure Joel (Pedro Pascal), archenemy Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), steadfast Jesse (Young Mazino), militant Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) and their companions.

Speaking from Australia, where she’s working on Dever’s next movie, Godzilla x Kong: Skull Island, Foley discusses beanies, sneakers, color-coded character development, and the homemade ponchos worn by the kooky Seraphites religious cult.

The penultimate episode this season flashes back to Ellie as she grows up, birthday by birthday. Somehow, Bella Ramsey actually looks younger!

Bella’s amazing. One of the things I loved about Episode 6 was getting to see Ellie’s progression through costumes, from a 14-year-old turning 15 to a 19-year-old young woman battling internal demons.

How did you change Ellie’s clothes to indicate the changes she goes through?

When Ellie wakes up the morning of her fifteenth birthday, you see her in a yellow T-shirt with stripes. Then as Ellie progresses, the palette gets a little bit darker, and we start moving into this blue palette that you see in most of Season 2. That has echoes in Joel’s palette, which gets more blue as he gets a little darker and a little sadder. These two people are on a very similar journey emotionally and I wanted their clothing to reflect that.

Along the way Ellie switches from Converse sneakers to hiking boots.

Ellie has to give up the Converse because they would not be practical for her to wear on the journey to Seattle. What I loved about the Converse — it’s probably one of my favorite costume moments of the season — were the doodles. Having watched the video game, I became slightly obsessed with Ellie doodling in the journal, so I came up with this idea I pitched to Craig: “What if Ellie were doodling on her shoes the way teenagers do?” So early on during pre-production, I gave a pair to Bella and said, “I want you to doodle on these like Ellie would.” I didn’t give her any direction, just “Here they are.” A month later, I got them back, and they were so cool. I didn’t even ask what the doodles meant because that was between Bella and Ellie.

It’s cold most of the time in this show, so it only makes sense that there would be a ton of stocking caps.

Beanies.

Beanies, yeah. Nearly everybody wears muted colors except for Dina. Her beanie is bright and striped like a rainbow!

Dina will always have a brighter color palette due to who she is as a person and as a character. You can even see it in the game – Dina’s always going to be more colorful. When I found that beanie in a sale bin at some random store in Vancouver, it just felt right for her, and the same for her Aviator Nation jacket that I had on my mood board, to evoke that late 90s vibe. It doesn’t fit our timeline, where all clothes stopped in 2003, and Aviator Nation started in 2006. But when Neil Druckmann saw the jacket, he immediately thought it could be an iconic piece for Dina.

Joel’s likeable younger brother Tommy, played by Gabriel Luna, stands out from the crowd because he’s wearing bright plaid when the Infected hordes attack. What inspired that look?

When I was doing my research for Tommy, I came across this image of the Marlboro man on horseback riding through deep snow, and I went, “Yep, that’s Tommy.” Also, I felt it was important for the audience and [wife] Maria [Rutina Wesley] to spot Tommy in all of that chaos, which is why I kept red off of everyone else and dressed only Tommy in red.

Kaitlyn Dever’s character, Abby, arguably the Season 2 villain, dresses in a fairly subdued fashion. What were you going for with her costumes?

It’s funny, I don’t see Abby as the villain. I see Abby and Ellie as being on a very similar journey of vengeance over their fathers, so their color palettes are going to be very similar. You see Ellie in a lot of blues and greens. With Abby, it’s blue with greys and tans, staying true to the WLF color palette. I wanted there to be a similar color story, with blue, to show that Ellie and Abby are sort of mirrors of each other.

Jeffrey Wright plays Isaac, leader of the Washington Liberation Front. What informed his “Wolf” uniform?

I pulled that straight from the game. My feeling about a character piece like that is, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Jeffrey played [the voice of] Isaac in the game; there wasn’t anything I could do to improve upon it.

The Seraphites barely speak a word of dialogue, but they play a pretty big role in Season 2 as violent enemies of Isaac and his Wolves. How did you arrive at their primitive look?

My concept costume illustrator, Imogene Chayes, and I worked closely with Ashley Swidowski, one of the game designers at Naughty Dog. We had multiple conversations with her, then went a step further to come up with the next evolution. In the game, they’re wearing black raincoats, but because the Seraphites are Luddites who make all their own tools and their own clothes, it didn’t feel realistic for them to have built raincoats. The Seraphites lived by the water near the abandoned Marina, so I thought, “What if they sourced canvas from old boats?” If you look at the Seraphites’ ponchos, you’ll see different colors of canvas because every single poncho is hand-painted by my breakdown team. Each poncho is unique to that actor.

Early in the season, hundreds of zombies attack Ellie and Joel’s community in Jackson, Wyoming. Logistically, costuming so many Infected creatures must have been a massive undertaking.

We did close to 600 fittings for Episode 2, and most of it was for the Infected. We fit every single actor into their own unique look to give each their own personality. Because of the snow in that episode, we also wanted to infuse as much color as we could so the Infected don’t completely disappear in the blizzard. That was really fun, and we also had multiple stages, from “just been bit” on up to the [final] Clicker stage. It took ten days to integrate all the Cordyceps [prosthetics] we got from Barry Gower and his brilliant team because one of our conversations with Craig and Neil had to do with taking it to the next level, where we see the fibers falling away and the ooze from the Cordyceps coming through. It was a wonderful process.

You spent about a year in Vancouver working on The Last of Us. Looking back on the experience, how do you feel about your contributions to the season?

I just hope the fans love the show as much as we loved making it. This season, it’s larger in scale, and aesthetically, it’s darker, but the show also has moments of light, which I hope the audience picks up on.

The Last of Us season 2 is playing in its entirety on HBO Max. 

Featured image: Bella Ramsey, Isabela Merced. Photo Courtesy HBO.