HBO’s The Last of Us TV show will soon be adapting the back half of The Last of Us Part 2 in its third season, and it will be neat to see how much more we might get to explore Jerry’s character, as opposed to the game. Patrick Wilson has reportedly been cast in this upcoming season. With only one character that he would be a shoo-in for seemingly on the table, it is funny, if not baffling, that the show could be recasting Jerry in the same fashion as the games.
Has HBO’s The Last of Us Cast a New Jerry?
The first character that is likely to come to mind when hearing that Patrick Wilson has been cast in The Last of Us Season 3 is Jerry, Abby’s father and the head surgeon whose murder at the hands of Joel effectively denies any chance of a viable vaccine for the Cordyceps brain infection ever being manufactured, supposedly. However, this is not who was cast to play Jerry when the character appeared briefly at the end of The Last of Us Season 1.
The show’s Jerry was played by actor Darren Dolynski, who was conveniently covered head to toe in surgical attire. The likeliest outcome of this is that Darren Dolynski was purposefully cast as a stand-in or ‘understudy’ so that there would not need to be an immediate commitment to a high-profile, A-list actor, especially if he was only going to have a deliberately tiny role as an unidentified character in the first season.
On IMDb, Darren Dolynski is credited simply as “Surgeon,” concealing the character’s true identity.
Not dissimilar to how this nameless surgeon suddenly became a significant character in The Last of Us Part 2, so too should he in The Last of Us Season 3. It is fully possible that he has been recast now that the show will have to actually develop the character, though that would also ironically be shortsighted (and unfortunate for Darren Dolynski, too, as he would be losing the role).
Abby’s Dad is a Man of Many Faces
Casting Jerry is something that the TV show arguably should have prepared for in advance, assuming that Patrick Wilson truly is playing him. The Last of Us’ Naughty Dog had the excuse of probably not having even considered that the surgeon could be as paramount and story-rippling as he turned out to be, for instance, and the graphical bounds that The Last of Us Part 2 makes in comparison to The Last of Us ensured that his character model would require an update, anyhow.
But, because The Last of Us’ TV show is an adaptation of the games, it knew that the Salt Lake City hospital surgeon would eventually be vital to the narrative, even if this fact was obscured in Season 1 so that a future reveal of her being Abby’s father would land with audiences who have not played the games it is inspired by. Therefore, recasting or remodeling Jerry as the games did was not an inevitability or unavoidable for the show, as it knew it would flesh him out as a character later on.
The Last of Us Season 3 is currently in development.
- Release Date
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January 15, 2023
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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Craig Mazin
- Directors
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Craig Mazin, Peter Hoar, Jeremy Webb, Ali Abbasi, Mark Mylod, Stephen Williams, Jasmila Žbanić, Liza Johnson, Nina Lopez-Corrado
- Writers
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Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin, Halley Wegryn Gross