Physicality isn’t the only key difference between the Abby of HBO’s The Last of Us and the original video game.

The Last of Us Part II, released by Naughty Dog in 2020 for the PlayStation 4, picked up five years after the events of the first game, with Joel and Ellie living a relatively peaceful life in Jackson, Wyo. A mysterious group, led by a woman named Abby, arrives to brutally disrupt that peace. Players don’t get much information about Abby at the start of the story. It’s only after you play through half the game as Ellie when it takes a sudden shift and you rewind to play through the same timeline but from Abby’s perspective.

The HBO adaptation takes a different approach to relaying that backstory. Without giving away spoilers, as we’re still weeks out from the season 2 premiere, Neil Druckmann, series co-creator with Craig Mazin, explained during a press conference in Los Angeles on Monday why they will give some of that information to viewers much earlier.

“There are two reasons why we moved certain things up in the story,” Druckmann began, “one of which [is] in the game…you play as Abby, so you immediately form an empathic connection with her because you’re surviving as her, you’re running through the snow, you’re fighting infected, and we can withhold certain things and make it a mystery that will be revealed later in the story. We couldn’t do that in the show because you’re not playing as her. So we need other tools, and that context gave us that shortcut.”

Another reason, he continued, involved where the Abby revelation occurs in the context of the game. “If we were to stick to a very similar timeline, viewers would have to wait a very, very long time to get that context,” he noted. “It would probably get spoiled to them between seasons, and we didn’t want that. So it felt appropriate for those reasons to move that up and give that context right off the bat.”

Dever’s Abby will be joined in The Last of Us season 2 by Danny Ramirez as Manny, Tati Gabrielle as Nora, Ariela Barer as Mel, and Spencer Lord as Owen. Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Gabriel Luna, and Rutina Wesley all return as their season 1 characters: Joel, Ellie, Tommy, and Maria, respectively.

Additional cast includes Isabela Merced as Dina, Ellie’s love interest in Jackson; Young Mazino as Jesse, Ellie’s close friend and Dina’s ex; Jeffrey Wright as Isaac, the warlord character he originated in The Last of Us Part II; Catherine O’Hara as Gail, Joel’s therapist in Jackson; Joe Pantoliano as Eugene, an obscure character from the game; Robert John Burke as Seth, a bar owner in Jackson; Noah Lamanna as Kat, Ellie’s ex-girlfriend; and Alanna Ubach, Ben Ahlers, and Hettienne Park as new characters.

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Druckmann and Mazin already addressed the other big change to the Abby character in a previous interview with Entertainment Weekly. The Abby of the game (voiced and performed by Laura Bailey) is much more of a muscled, hulking figure, compared to Dever’s Abby on the show. Druckmann explained at the time how, in Part II, “We needed Ellie to feel smaller and kind of maneuver around, and Abby was meant to play more like Joel in that she’s almost like a brute in the way she can physically manhandle certain things. That doesn’t play as big of a role in this version of the story because there’s not as much violent action moment to moment. It’s more about the drama. I’m not saying there’s no action here. It’s just, again, different priorities and how you approach it.”

“I personally think that there is an amazing opportunity here to delve into someone who is perhaps physically more vulnerable than the Abby in the game, but whose spirit is stronger,” Mazin remarked. “And then the question is, ‘Where does her formidable nature come from and how does it manifest?’ That’s something that will be explored now and later.”

The Last of Us season 2 premieres Sunday, April 13 on HBO and Max.