The Last Of Us premiere had a killer cameo fans are only just spotting

The Last of Us will feature Ellie and Joel's original actors at a later point in the show, however, fans are floored to find out that there's a fateful cameo in the first episode that has apparently gone unnoticed til now.

Spoilers follow, so head on out now if you're yet to see the show.

"In creating this series, showrunners [Craig] Mazin and [Neil] Druckmann have managed to do that very, very rare thing. They’ve got everything right," said Kate in her review of The Last of Us, and she isn't alone in her appraisal. While there were a few twists for fans of the game, the first episode When You’re Lost In The Darkness has been lauded as an unequivocal success with exceedingly high hopes for the rest of the show. Some are even saying it's better than the original inspiration, and if you won't take their word for it, among them is Part 2 director Kurt Margenau.

Check out the trailer for HBO's The Last of Us here:

It is known that Ellie and Joel's original actors, Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, are appearing in HBO's show. Johnson plays Ellie's mother Anna, in a beautiful circular moment for the character, and Baker is a senior member of a group of settlers with a somewhat brutal approach to survival. Yes, you guessed it. We don't need to say it, but that is who you think it is, bar a new name.

These two are yet to show up, of course, but there is one incredible cameo that fans are only noticing in the several days following the first episode's release. The soldier that shoots Joel and Sarah as they attempt to escape Austin is in fact showrunner Craig Mazin (thanks to YouTuber Erik Voss for this detail).

The fateful soldier in the prologue is a cameo by series co-creator Craig Mazin. Wild to see so many act like all he ever wrote were goofy spoof movies, as if Chernobyl wasn't the best thing on HBO in the past decade. 🙄

Listen to Scriptnotes, folks. He's a screenwriting genius. pic.twitter.com/oYxozycPhQ

— Erik Voss (@eavoss) January 16, 2023

Appreciably, it is difficult to identify the famous screenwriter in fatigues, a gas mask, and backlit by the light on his rifle. What you can do now is pretend to your fellow The Last of Us fans you knew that the entire time. We won't tell.