Merle Dandridge: The Only Actor To Play the Same Role in Both The Last of Us Game and Show
When HBO’s The Last of Us premiered on January 15, 2023, millions of viewers met Marlene for the first time. Long‑time players, though, were already familiar with her voice, her posture, and even the way she carried a rifle.
That was because Marlene on television was played by the same person who had originated her in the games: Merle Dandridge.
During Season 1, Dandridge was the only actor to portray the same character in both Naughty Dog’s games and the HBO series. Other game alumni, like Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, appeared on the show, but in different roles. By December 2025, additional game actors have started to cross that bridge. Yet Dandridge remains the first person to carry a single character from a motion‑capture volume to one of the most‑watched prestige dramas on television.
Her route to that point runs from a U.S. Air Force family in Okinawa, through Nebraska high school theater, onto Broadway stages, into BAFTA‑winning game work, and finally into HBO’s biggest new hit in more than a decade.
From Okinawa Bases to Chicago Conservatories
Merle Dandridge’s story starts far from Boston’s quarantine zone.
She was born on May 31, 1975, in Okinawa, Japan, to a Korean‑Japanese mother and an African‑American father serving in the U.S. Air Force. She has described her mother as “half Japanese and Korean” and has said she also spent significant time in Seoul during her early years.
Because of her father’s service, the family moved between bases. They lived at Beale Air Force Base in California and then Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Nebraska, where she spent most of her childhood. Growing up in Nebraska, she has recalled being one of the few mixed‑race kids in a largely white community, while her family “brought all of the flavor unapologetically” with homemade kimchi and egg rolls at school events.
Her path into acting started almost by accident. At Papillion La Vista High School outside Omaha, a friend suggested she take drama as an easy elective. She later said that bit of advice “changed the course” of her life, because she immediately found her community in the theater department and play production class.
After high school, Dandridge moved to Chicago to train professionally. She studied at the Theatre Conservatory at Roosevelt University, now part of the Chicago College of Performing Arts. That conservatory training, and the city’s busy theater scene, set up the next phase of her career.
Eight Shows a Week: Building Characters on Broadway
Before anyone handed her a motion‑capture suit, Merle Dandridge spent years building characters the old‑fashioned way: on stage, eight times a week.
According to the Internet Broadway Database and her own site, she joined the 2000 revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, playing a Soul Girl and Disciple, and understudying Mary Magdalene. She then moved into Disney’s Aida, initially in the ensemble as Nehebka and later as a replacement Aida during the show’s early‑2000s run.
More high‑profile roles followed:
- Tarzan (opened May 10, 2006): Dandridge originated Kala, a demanding physical role that, by her account, required months of yoga, capoeira, and flight training.
- Rent: She played Joanne Jefferson as a replacement on Broadway and in the 2009 — 2010 U.S. tour.
- Monty Python’s Spamalot: She stepped into the role of The Lady of the Lake in 2008 and later reprised it in a 2015 Hollywood Bowl staging.
- Once on This Island (2017 revival): At Circle in the Square Theatre, she played Papa Ge, the god of death, in the show’s acclaimed revival.
- Hadestown: In 2025, she returned to Broadway as Persephone, appearing as a replacement from February 18 to June 1, 2025.
That stage work did not just fill out a résumé. It also trained her to live inside characters for long stretches. In one interview about returning to Marlene for HBO, Dandridge pointed out that on Broadway you inhabit a role “eight shows a week for maybe a year at a time.” That experience, she said, taught her to “sit in characters and get to know them on a very intimate level.”
Talking about Marlene specifically, she has said, “Marlene never really left me… I felt like her essence stayed with me for that long period of time.” Those comments are not abstract. By the time the HBO series arrived, she had already played Marlene in multiple projects over roughly a decade.
From Alyx Vance to a BAFTA: A Career in Narrative Games
While Dandridge built her stage career, she also became a recognizable voice to PC and console players.
In 2004, she voiced Alyx Vance in Half‑Life 2, then continued the role in the episodic follow‑ups Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007). Alyx quickly became one of the most prominent women in mainstream first‑person shooters, and her performance helped establish Dandridge as a reliable lead in narrative‑driven games.
Her game work expanded over the next decade:
- Dota 2: She has voiced Legion Commander and Winter Wyvern since the game’s early 2010s release.
- Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016): She appeared in smaller roles, including Evelyn and a nun.
- Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical (2023): She voiced Aphrodite in a project that exploits her musical theater skills.
One project in particular brought major industry recognition. In 2015, she voiced Kate Collins in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, an atmospheric PlayStation game from The Chinese Room. At the 12th British Academy Games Awards in 2016, the game won three BAFTA Games Awards, including Performer – Merle Dandridge for her role as Kate. That BAFTA Games win put her in a small group of performers formally recognized for their work in game storytelling.
Her theater work was also reaching award level. The 2017 Broadway revival cast album of Once on This Island was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards in 2019. Dandridge is listed among the principal soloists on that recording, which gives her the right to call herself Grammy‑nominated as well as BAFTA‑winning.
By the mid‑2010s, then, she had already proven she could anchor complex characters on both stage and in digital worlds.
Meeting Marlene: The Last of Us Games
Dandridge first stepped into Marlene’s boots for Naughty Dog’s original The Last of Us, released for PlayStation 3 in 2013.
She did not just record lines in a booth. She also performed motion capture, acting scenes physically on a capture stage alongside co‑stars like Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson. That hybrid process — part theater, part film, part digital animation — matched her range of skills. She has said she was drawn to Marlene’s “integrity and moral compass” and to the fact that the character was constantly facing her worst nightmares.
Her performance carried into The Last of Us: Remastered on PS4, and she joined castmates for “The Last of Us Live”, a stage event where they performed scenes from the game in front of an audience. In 2020, she returned again to the role in The Last of Us Part II, appearing in flashbacks recorded roughly seven years after the first game.
By the time HBO called, Dandridge had portrayed Marlene in four different formats: the original game, the sequel, a live stage performance, and now television. Speaking at Brazil’s CCXP in 2022, she said she had met the character “10 years ago this month” and called getting to play her four times “an honor.”
That long relationship matters. It meant that when she arrived on the HBO set, she was not building Marlene from scratch. She was revisiting a woman she had already played through some of the story’s biggest ethical choices.
Leading on Television Before HBO
While game fans knew her as Alyx and Marlene, television viewers were getting used to seeing Dandridge at the center of ensemble dramas.
In 2015, she was cast as Grace “Gigi” Greenleaf in OWN’s megachurch drama Greenleaf, which ran from 2016 to 2020. The series focuses on a powerful Black megachurch family in Memphis. Dandridge’s character is the estranged daughter who returns after 20 years for her sister’s funeral and begins to confront the church’s secrets. The role was her first series lead, and several reports noted that Oprah Winfrey personally supported her casting.
In 2020, she appeared on HBO Max’s dark comedy thriller The Flight Attendant as Kim Hammond, adding a premium‑cable credit before The Last of Us ever began filming.
She also joined Station 19, the Grey’s Anatomy spinoff on ABC, as Fire Chief Natasha Ross. She first appeared in Season 5 (2021 — 2022) as a recurring character, then was promoted to series regular for Season 6. Within the show’s world, Ross is the Seattle Fire Department’s first woman and woman‑of‑color fire chief, another role that placed Dandridge in a leadership position on screen.
Add in earlier recurring work on Sons of Anarchy as Rita Roosevelt, and by the early 2020s she was firmly established in television drama before returning to the role that game fans already associated with her.
HBO’s The Last of Us: From Mocap Volume to Alberta Sets
HBO’s The Last of Us premiered on January 15, 2023, on HBO and HBO Max. The first episode drew 4.7 million viewers in the United States across linear and streaming on its first night, making it HBO’s second‑biggest series debut since 2010. By May 2023, Season 1 was averaging almost 32 million viewers per episode in the U.S., and HBO described it as the network’s most‑watched debut season.
The scale of the production matched those numbers. Reporting during Season 1’s run noted that the nine‑episode season’s budget was so large it exceeded the cost of the first five seasons of Game of Thrones combined.
In that context, Merle Dandridge’s casting carried unusual weight. In 2021, she was announced as Marlene in the television adaptation, reprising her role from the games. Other game actors returned in new parts — Troy Baker appears as James, Ashley Johnson plays Anna, and Jeffrey Pierce plays Perry — but Dandridge alone kept her original character.
During Season 1, outlets like Elle and Jezebel described her as the only “legacy actor” from the games to reprise the same role on the show. Jezebel called her “the only actor to star in the video game and reprise their role in the series,” a description that matched the Season 1 cast list.
For Dandridge, the shift from a motion‑capture volume to physical sets in Alberta was both familiar and strange. She told TheWrap that it was “emotional” to put on Marlene’s costume after years of acting her in a mocap suit. At first, she said it felt “a little bit of a touch and go on the clutch,” but once she adjusted, “it was off to the races.”
She also pointed out that by 2022 she had “actually become more appropriate” to play Marlene on camera, having aged into the character and gained over a decade of screen experience since the original game sessions.
Relearning a Character She “Knows So Well”
Despite knowing Marlene intimately, Dandridge did not treat the HBO role as a simple repeat.
In interviews with outlets like CBR, she said one of her first tasks was to “untether” herself from the specific sound of her 2013 performance. The new scripts, she explained, “elucidated some new experiences for her,” especially around Marlene’s exhaustion after 20 years of resistance work. That required her to stay open to “fresh inspiration” instead of chasing a perfect match with the game.
She contrasted the image of a “fist in the air” revolutionary she carried from the game with a “heavier stillness” that emerged on the show. On television, viewers had more time to see the cost of leadership in Marlene’s posture, pauses, and quiet moments.
At the same time, she acknowledged that “the truth of the scenes was like riding a bike because I know her so well.” That balance — deep familiarity, paired with a willingness to change — helped her navigate scenes with new collaborators like Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, as well as with co‑creator Craig Mazin.
The show also gave her material she had never played before. Episode 9 opens with a flashback to Anna, Ellie’s mother, played by Ashley Johnson. For the first time, audiences see Marlene as Anna’s close friend, forced to kill her after a bite. Dandridge said that sequence “just wrecked” her and reframed every later decision Marlene makes about Ellie and the Fireflies’ planned surgery.
She described the character as a point of contrast to Joel. In her view, Joel chooses a kind of selfishness in the finale, prioritizing his personal bond with Ellie above any broader good. Marlene, by contrast, chooses selflessness as she understands it, accepting the loss of Ellie to pursue a possible cure. The show’s expanded material let her play that contrast more explicitly than the game’s shorter scenes allowed.
From “Only” to “First”: Where Things Stand in 2025
When viewers first met HBO’s version of Marlene in January 2023, Merle Dandridge held a completely unique position: the only performer playing the same character in The Last of Us games and the television series.
By Season 2, which premiered on April 13, 2025, that category started to fill in. Jeffrey Wright, who voiced Isaac Dixon in The Last of Us Part II, joined the show as Isaac as well. Entertainment Weekly reported that his casting made him the third actor from the games to portray their original character on the series, after Dandridge and Laura Bailey, whose brief appearance as a nurse in the Season 1 finale mirrored her nurse role in the second game’s hospital sequence.
Some outlets still casually describe Isaac as only the second such case, but the detailed breakdown places Dandridge as the first, Bailey as the second, and Wright as the third.
Either way, the broader point remains: Merle Dandridge was the trailblazer, demonstrating that a performance first built in a motion‑capture studio could anchor a live‑action prestige drama for tens of millions of viewers.
What Happens Next
As of late 2025, Merle Dandridge’s career spans nearly every storytelling medium in which The Last of Us exists.
She is BAFTA‑winning for her video game work, Grammy‑nominated for a Broadway cast recording, and a regular presence on network and streaming television. She has played leads in series like Greenleaf, held authority roles on Station 19, and appeared in projects from HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant to Apple TV+’s Truth Be Told. Onstage, she returned to Broadway in Hadestown during the same year The Last of Us’ second season released.
Within this mix, Marlene remains a through‑line. Dandridge first auditioned for the role around 2013, met the character on a gray mocap stage, and has since played her across two games, a live event, and a television series that averaged about 32 million viewers per episode in its first season.
In Season 1, she was the only actor to make that exact leap from game role to identical television role. As of 2025, others have joined her, but she still stands as the first to prove that a character born in a console exclusive could survive the transition to HBO without changing faces.
For fans of The Last of Us, that continuity matters. It anchors the adaptation in the world they first explored on PlayStation. For Merle Dandridge, it represents something more personal: a decade‑long conversation with a single character, informed by years of stage work, game performance, and television drama that started on a military base in Nebraska and wound its way to one of the biggest shows on television.
