The cast of The Last of Us is bidding farewell to one of their own.
Danny Ramirez has officially departed the show, leaving after only one season playing Manny in the post-apocalyptic HBO series.
Per Entertainment Weekly, when the character was first announced for season two, he was described as "a loyal soldier whose sunny outlook belies the pain of old wounds and a fear that he will fail his friends when they need him most."
The outlet reports that Danny, who is also known for his roles on Captain America: Brave New World, Top Gun: Maverick, and next year will premiere Avengers: Doomsday, will have to be recast because of a scheduling conflict.
It has yet to be publicly determined who will be recast in the Manny role, but it is far from the only shake-up the hit TV show has faced in recent months.
This summer, the series' co-creator Neil Druckman, who co-developed the original Last of Us video game that the show is based on in 2013, exited the series, as well as co-writer Halley Gross, before season 3 was in the works.
In August, fellow co-creator Craig Mazin — now the lone writer on season 3 — offered an update on how development on the new season is coming along, speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, maintaining he is in his "favorite time" of the development process.
"It's very quiet. It's just sitting here with my wonderful ergonomic keyboard and clacking away. The pages are happening, and I get to be a monk for a while, which I love, and I just write. It's the purest form of what I do," he shared.
"Then in just a couple of months or so, that happy time will start to be less quiet because we begin a very long prep period while I'm still writing, and then we begin to shoot while I'm still writing," he went on, and noted: "In seasons one and two, I finished writing about six weeks before we started shooting the last episode. I don't necessarily recommend this method other than to say this works for me, but it is insane."
Neil and Halley stepped away from The Last of Us to return to Naughty Dog, the PlayStation-owned video game studio behind The Last of Us franchise, to work on a new title, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Asked whether the writing process for The Last of Us will change, Craig maintained: "I don't think it is, in the sense that I was pretty much a monk just writing in a room by myself for most of the time regardless."
He continued: "I've gotten so much out of talking with them over the course of seasons one and two. When we made season two, we really were thinking about what comes after because you can't really tell half of that story without thinking about what the whole story should be. So we really did get that work in."
"Neil's always had a full-time job running Naughty Dog, so it's always been me up in Canada [where the production is], and, ultimately, things are pretty much going to proceed as usual," he emphasized.