From Ginny & Georgia to The Last of Us, Noah Lamanna is a non-binary star on the rise

Within two short months, Noah Lamanna has been blasted onto our TV screens in two of 2025’s most anticipated series.

In the second season of post-apocalyptic horrorscape The Last of Us, they are Kat, the ex-girlfriend of Bella Ramsey’s brutal lead survivalist, Ellie Williams. In season three of Netflix’s improbable yet delightfully moreish drama Ginny & Georgia, they are Tris, all-smoking, all-skating maths geek and love interest to Katie Douglas’s Abby.

“It was really fun to just have the chance to be this kind of light, chill, down-to-earth character. Everyone else is really kind of going through it,” the Canadian actor says of the latter. It’s an understatement, considering Ginny & Georgia’s central characters spent season three embroiled in a murderous web of lies.

Neither role is huge, but Lamanna has felt the full force of both shows’ gigantic and intense fandoms – for better and for worse. “There’s quite a few fan edits on TikTok that I’ve encountered, which is a fun and funny thing,” says Lamanna of Tris and Abby’s burgeoning romance. “I mean, people seem to ship Abby and Tris!”

Similarly, the actor has had “lovely and supportive and awesome” interactions online with The Last of Us fans, but here there has been a flip side. “People have a thought and they need to broadcast it to the world, for whatever reason.” The Last of Us, which was adapted from the wildly successful Naughty Dog games of the same name, has fostered a ginormous fanbase, many of whom have very rigid opinions that they are very brazen about sharing.

Ramsey, plus Kaitlyn Dever, who plays antagonist Abby, have faced social media vitriol for months about their appearance, acting, gender, sexuality. It seems these un-pleasantries extend to the supporting cast, too. “I saw that other, dark side of it,” Lamanna says, though they’ve mostly been able to laugh it off. “This is a PSA to the gaming community: you have to chill. It’s not that serious. It’s going to be OK!”

Lamanna filmed their audition tape for Ginny & Georgia in a hotel bathroom while on set for The Last of Us. After a bit of toing and froing, Netflix confirmed that they had booked the gig. It turned out to be the largest of their career, yet they “didn’t really even have the chance to feel daunted” because within days, they were on set, filming. 

The dearth of nerves probably comes down to experience, too. Lamanna, who is based in Toronto but grew up in Ontario, was raised on a diet of performance art: drag, puppeteering, musical theatre, dance classes every night. “I got put into musical theatre early. The story goes that it was because I was very clumsy and my mother wanted to mitigate that,” they explain. “It just has naturally always felt like the path.”

A trickle of roles came, in one-off appearances in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Elliot Page’s The Umbrella Academy, and award-winning comedy series Avocado Toast. 2023 offered their first role with heft, as Chief Jay in Paramount+ series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and things have been on an upward trajectory since. 

“I think this does feel hopefully like a turning point,” Lamanna says. They’re talking about the positive one-two punch on their filmography, but they could equally be talking about the media landscape, and its historic depictions of trans and non-binary people. Lamanna joined Ginny & Georgia because it felt like a “revamped Gilmore Girls situation” that was somehow still “fresh”, but they also liked the way Tris – who is non-binary, like Lamanna – was written.

“It’s never part of the conversation. It’s really refreshing that we’ve now arrived at that place in media where people have enough context for gender expansiveness that not every character on TV needs a full back story and explanation to catch the audience up. It just is what it is.” Some fans of the show, the actor says, haven’t even realised that Tris is non-binary. “To me, that’s fine. I don’t need to beat you over the head with it… but for those who need it and resonate with it and are hungry for it, it’s there.”

Such storytelling has evolved exponentially in the past few years, Lamanna believes. Earlier on their career, they were “seeing a lot of stuff come through where I was like, ‘This is a heinous attempt at representation’”, the types of roles where “it’s abundantly clear that a straight person just saw some other trans character on a show and tried to write something and did a terrible job”. They have grace for those who have created poor trans characters in the past – “People are trying and people are learning” – but they’re also glad to see the dial shift.

Lamanna has seen such “movement” behind the camera, on sets too. More productions than ever have cast and crew pronouns noted, the actor says, and they have arrived at a place where they “don’t have the desire or energy to like move through the world correcting people all the time”. On The Last of Us, which is led by a non-binary actor in Bella Ramsey, such effort wasn’t required. As one of TV’s most queer-inclusive shows, Lamanna fit right in.

The actor was already a fan of The Last of Us thanks largely to its “interesting track record” of queer storytelling, namely when the show put Nick Offerman – a “canonically masc hetero straight icon” – in role as a gay guy (as Bill, in season one episode three, a role which won him an Emmy Award in 2023). In Lamanna’s view, the move has helped to “demistify” queer relationships, at a time where queer love is often gatekept as an “unrelatable and alien experience that only gay people can understand”. They explain it plainly: “Nick Offerman kissed a man and nothing exploded, you know? I think there’s value in people seeing that.”

Season two filmed in the depths of the Canadian winter, with Lamanna’s key role being: ride horse with Bella Ramsey. On set, the pair got to talk just a little about being non-binary performers in an industry still adjusting to accommodate them. “I mean, they’re lovely. They’re so much older and wiser than their age,” Lamanna says of 21-year-old Ramsey. 

“We got on swimmingly. We had some time to kill in the frigid wilderness; we were blow-drying our feet between takes. Yeah, it was nice. We did have some of those conversations.” From what Lamanna saw, Ramsey is dealing “really well” with life under the public microscope. “They’re really down to earth and seem to have a lot of their s**t together.”

Back to that fervent fanbase. Ramsey has received what Lamanna politely describes as “intense feedback”. Are they, as a non-binary person inching ever-closer to the spotlight at an increasingly hostile time, worried about receiving similar such “feedback”?

“The more visibility that I start to receive, the more intense that side of it will become – when you sort of start becoming a face of an issue, right? And that is very much how queer and trans and non-binary people are publicly perceived right now: it’s just like an issue and a talking point.” Already, they are finding little ways of dealing with it. “I basically learned, like, you don’t look at the comments.” There’s even comedy to be found in the head-spinning lengths some go to in order to be transphobic. “I really cherish those comments where they’re like, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ and I’m like, ‘Oh my god! Thank you!’”

Despite mindless trolls, Lamanna is ready to be “out there publicly, as a human being,” and ready to “present a group of people beyond just being an issue”.

Hopefully, there will be more opportunities to do just that. They’re keen to be part of Ginny & Georgia season four and are “hoping we can give [fans] a lot more [Tris and Abby] next season”, though they know nothing of when production might start. Perhaps as viewers come to love and respect Tris, they will do the same for non-binary folk in the real world. “Infiltrating people’s living rooms,” Lamanna says, “is a good way to start”.

Ginny & Georgia is streaming on Netflix. The Last of Us is streaming on HBO and NOW.

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