Bella Ramsey, the 19-year-old English actor who plays Ellie in the Last of Us, has come out as gender-fluid. As they said in an interview with the New York Times, "Being gendered isn’t something that I particularly like, but in terms of pronouns, I really couldn’t care less".
HBO's The Last of Us is incredible (and we went into exactly why during the EarlyGame podcast this week), so before going any further, please just go away and watch it. Now you're back after watching that near-perfect first episode, you can understand why all eyes are on the actor who plays Ellie.
The character of Ellie is masterfully portrayed, and Bella Ramsey should be proud. But Ramsey has also been hitting the headlines this week for coming out as gender-fluid, which is great news for the increasing diversity we see in Hollywood.
Bella Ramsey Comes Out As Gender-Fluid
Bella Ramsey spoken openly with the New York Times recently about being gender-fluid, and how important it was that awards like "Best Young Performer" were becoming non-gender-specific. Ramsey won the award for their role in the medieval-comedy Catherine Called Birdy, and in the interview they spoke about how affirming it was for gender-fluid actors like themselves.
Here's exactly how Ramsey describes the experience of being non-binary:
Someone would call me ‘she’ or ‘her’ and I wouldn’t think about it, but I knew that if someone called me ‘he’ it was a bit exciting... I’m very much just a person. Being gendered isn’t something that I particularly like, but in terms of pronouns, I really couldn’t care less
It's just a short, positive bit of news to put a smile on your face. After all, we don't want every headline to be about Andrew Tate and the fanboys protesting his arrest...
If you need even more of TLoU in your life, we got you: