Tati Gabrielle of The Last of Us is about to go Intergalactic (exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Last of Us season 2, episode 5, "Feel Her Love."

Tati Gabrielle is so not what you would expect, based on the characters she plays.

She's nothing like the edgy, mean-girl witch from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina or the ferocious treasure-seeking mercenary in the Uncharted movie. Her typical speaking voice isn't even the same timbre as Marienne Bellamy from You or Nora from The Last of Us when we meet for breakfast in Williamsburg on one of Brooklyn's first sunny days of the spring season. It's much brighter and airy.

An assortment of rings and bracelets adorn her hands, and three small, black stars accent her cheeks. There's something spritely about the 29-year-old San Francisco-born, recent New York City transplant.

Gabrielle reveals she is her mom's "bohemian child," a spiritual person big on connection and communion.

"I've been a hippy kid since I was little," she tells Entertainment Weekly. "I've always said, 'Let's love, nobody fight.'"

On the other hand, she's "psychotically chipper and overly optimistic" to her brother. In practice, that means Gabrielle takes things as they come and doesn't put too much expectation on anything.

"I feel like expectation is where you also find disappointment," she says.

And yet, somehow this cosmically connected flower child, who enjoys the simple pleasure of finding a menu item that's both gluten-free and sweet (caramelized pineapple toast), plays such dark performances. With her latest, Nora on The Last of Us, she gives the HBO drama one of its most intense moments since the death of Pedro Pascal's Joel.

On set for 'The Last of Us' Pedro Pascal shocker (exclusive)

'You' season 5 recap: Goodbye… you

In episode 5, "Feel Her Love," available to watch now via HBO and Max, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) corners this member of Abby's (Kaitlyn Dever) crew at a hospital, chases her through the building, and beats her to death with a pipe, even as Nora sits on the ground, already dying from the airborne Cordyceps spores filling her lungs.

In some ways, Gabrielle herself is an Easter egg. This isn't the first time she's been involved in a project linked to Naughty Dog, the gaming studio that created the Last of Us video games. She first played Braddock in 2022's Uncharted, the Hollywood adaptation of the studio's popular video game series. Neil Druckmann, co-president of Naughty Dog and a showrunner on HBO's The Last of Us with Craig Mazin, later told Gabrielle, "You're one of my favorite parts of that movie," which led to her casting as Nora on the series.

And now Gabrielle is set to go intergalactic — Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, that is. She landed the lead role of Jordan A. Mun, a galactic bounty hunter in Naughty Dog's next original video game franchise.

"It still trips me out, the trajectory of all of this," Gabrielle opens up about this journey in an extended interview with EW. "And Neil telling me all the time, 'You're part of the Naughty Dog family now.' ... I think the universe works in such interesting ways."

Nora's death run

This late April interview occurs just two days after Joel's death episode aired; however, Gabrielle isn't as invested in social media as her Instagram footprint may suggest.

"It's mostly our group chats going off," she says. "Craig's sending us things, and I'm like, 'Oh, snap! This is getting wild.'"

Nora and the rest of Abby's group — Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer), and Manny (Danny Ramirez) — are essential to that scene. Even though they aren't the ones physically killing Joel, they bear witness, and prevent Ellie and Dina (Isabela Merced) from intervening. The camera tells the story of this moment through the spectrum of close-up facial reactions.

"I loved talking to Craig about the colors within the rest of us," Gabrielle remarks. "All of us feel a little bit different."

Nora is somewhere in the middle between Mel, who cries at the sight of a bludgeoned Joel, and Danny, who spits on his dead body before they all walk out together. As both a soldier and a doctor, "she has this duality of her own nature, of her own mind," Gabrielle explains. "Is she going to be able to compartmentalize this?"

She gets the space to dig into the quandary more in episode 5, which adapts the character's dramatic death scene from the game. Leaving Jesse and Dina behind, Ellie goes off on her own to surprise Nora at the WLF hospital. A chase ensues, ending in an area that's been warded off due to the killer spores in the air. This is where Ellie confronts the very person who physically held her down and forced her to watch helplessly as Abby killed Joel.

"I played with this idea of Nora disassociating at the top of episode 5," Gabrielle says of her approach. "You can maybe feel something, that it is weighing on her, but she's like, 'No, we did a thing, and it's done now' — until she is faced with Ellie, faced with the things she's done."

In another core divergence from the source material, which cuts to black as Ellie takes her first swing of the pipe, the show actually depicts the violent act of its main character beating Nora for information on Abby's whereabouts. The specifics of this scene, in particular, are harder for Gabrielle to remember. She divulges how someone close to her died around the filming of this episode.

"My brain was a little in and out," she remarks, "but I do remember Craig really wanting to lean into the shock and awe of this moment, of seeing everything that Nora had worked for with Abby's dad, of trying to find this cure. 'Why are you not understanding that he doomed all of us?' Ellie is abandoning all sense of logic in this moment, and Nora is, on one hand, accepting her fate for the thing that she did."

While she feels this moment between the two characters went by more quickly in the game, the episode (as Abby once did to Joel) took its time.

"It's almost like [Nora] feels like trying to get through to her. 'I get that you're angry, but look at the bigger picture here,'" Gabrielle continues. "And Ellie, in response, being like, 'Well, you guys didn't want the bigger picture.' An eye for an eye truly makes the whole world go blind."

In the video game, this moment isn't the last we see of Nora (originally portrayed by Chelsea Tavares). The character has more to do as the story jumps back and forth in time. It's still unclear exactly when and how the show will address future narrative beats, though gamers are getting the sense that the series could follow a similar trajectory. Gabrielle doesn't know how to answer this question just yet, so — she doesn't.

"I go by the rule of thumb that my mom told me when I was little: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all," she replies. "So in in the same way, if I can't say anything or if I have the chance of ruining spoilers, then I just won't say anything. You have to wait and see."

Gabrielle has other things on her mind these days, anyway.

Spacing out

The original The Last of Us, which released in 2013, made stars out of its lead actors, Troy Baker (Joel) and Ashley Johnson (Ellie), in the gaming space. Uncharted, similarly, became some of more widely recognized credits of Nolan North, who originated the game franchise's lead character, Nathan Drake. As Naughty Dog continues development on its next big IP, Gabrielle is left wondering how Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet might impact her life.

The studio unveiled the game that's been in the works since 2020 during the Game Awards ceremony last December. The announcement trailer revealed a story, set in an alternate history in which space travel progressed heavily by the year 1986, a factor that gives this galactic odyssey a retro-futuristic feel. Gabrielle's Jordan pilots a Porsche space ship, rocks an Akira-style red jacket, and watches anime.

In pursuit of her latest target, Kumail Nanjiani's Colin Graves, this bounty hunter is left stranded on the planet Sempiria. No person has ever made it out of its cursed orbit in 600 years. So Jordan, powered by a soundtrack composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, will have to use every trick she knows to escape.

When Gabrielle first joined the Uncharted adaptation, she was intrigued by the idea of making a movie based on that kind of source material. Now, headlining a video game is opening her up to a whole new set of experiences.

"Neil's been bootcamp-ing me," she says — though perhaps not in the ways you might think. "I know Troy's experience, I know Ashley's experience...I know Laura Bailey's experience."

Bailey originated the role of Abby in The Last of Us Part II and endured an onslaught of brutal gamer reactions to the character, especially after Abby kills Joel. In a making-of documentary, Bailey recalls through tears how these so-called fans even threatened her newborn over social media. Gabrielle, too, received backlash just for her presence as the lead of Intergalactic, though hers was racist in addition to misogynistic.

She recalls, "I got a lot of love, but there was a lot of hate over me being a woman, me being a woman of color, me having my head shaved, all these things that I didn't even actually initially see — I'm out of the social media zeitgeist for that reason — but once I did, Neil was like, 'Ignore it. No matter what, me and you, we're going to make something beautiful. We're going to make something that we're proud of.'"

If The Last of Us is about grief, Intergalactic is about faith. Druckmann told The New York Times the game centers around a fictitious religion and "what happens when you put your faith in different institutions." Gabrielle expounds on this concept.

"The question of faith is not black and white," she explains. "When you initially think of faith, you think of religion, which is a part of it, but there's also faith in oneself. There's faith in your environment or your community. All that faith means is, What are your beliefs? What are the things that you hope for? Faith sounds flowery, but we all experience it day in and day out. What is your reason for waking up?"

Full circle

This is all uncharted territory (pun intended) for Gabrielle. She's mentally preparing for this ascending career of hers, but especially in light of the initial polarizing feedback from the gaming community, she doesn't know what to expect.

"This is a world — video games — that I've never stepped into before. So I don't want to put one thing in my mind of expecting it's going to be this way and then it's not, and then I'm unprepared or take it too lightly," she says.

It's a big year for Gabrielle even outside of Intergalactic, which does not yet have a release date. She already appeared in The Last of Us and the final season of You, and has a performance of Jade in the film Mortal Kombat II coming out this Oct. 24. Her 12-year-old self, whom she describes as "a quirky, weird kid" and "a daydreamer" who "just wanted to create," is geeking out right now.

By the age of 10, Gabrielle was deep into taekwondo and karate and would later become a black belt. For a time, martial arts was her life: competing in tournaments and teaching younger kids. And Jade, wielding a long staff as her chief weapon, was a frequent pick of kid Gabrielle when she played Mortal Kombat. Now preparing to play the character on the big screen, she calls working with her Bo staff "a different challenge, but a fun one."

"The only reason that our stunt coordinators on that knew that I had a background in martial arts is because they were good friends with our stunt coordinator on Uncharted," she says. So, in a way, even that connects back to Naughty Dog.

"I'm really tripped out by how many doors it's opened today," she adds. "They were all from this little thing that I thought that I wasn't going to get. I love to be mindful when I think back on that journey. I never would've guessed."