The actress Ashley Johnson was born in Camarillo, California in 1983, later moving to Los Angeles and beginning her acting career at the age of six playing Chrissy Seaver on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains from 1990 to 1992. This led to ABC giving her roles in other sitcoms like Phenom (1993-94), All-American Girl (1994-95) and Maybe This Time (1995-96) as well as the lead role in the TV film Annie: A Royal Adventure! (1995) starring Johnson as Annie Warbucks. Johnson starred in a few other TV films, including two made-for-TV Growing Pains films and a 1993 dramatic film on CBS called Men Don’t Tell which told the unorthodox but still heartbreaking story of a man who is being violently abused by his wife and received praise for its searing performances. Ashley Johnson plays the couple’s daughter who, like her father, also becomes a target of her mother’s physical abuse.

None of her sitcoms following Growing Pains were successful but she got by on guest roles in shows like Roseanne, Wings, ER and Ally McBeal, and she also had a lot more success in voice roles, including her role as Peter Shepherd from 1996 to 1999 in the animated TV series adaptation of the 1995 live-action film Jumanji (which originally starred Bradley Pierce in the same role). The little brother from Jumanji would have been her biggest role since Growing Pains if not for Walt Disney Television Animation’s Recess (1997-2001) for which she voiced Gretchen Grundler, a role she would reprise three more times in three different Recess film adaptations.

In the 2000s Ashley Johnson had voice roles in animated series like Lloyd in Space, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, Teen Titans (for which she voiced the earth-shaking supervillain Terra, a role she reprised in Teen Titans Go!), King of the Hill and finally a main role in the Cartoon Network series Ben 10: Alien Force (2008-10) as the voice of Ben’s cousin Gwen, who she would also voice in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien (2010-12) and Ben 10: Omniverse (2012-14). This was followed in the next decade by recurring roles in Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Cartoon Network’s Infinity Train and a main role in the Prime Video series The Legend of Vox Machina (2022-present) which Johnson also executive produces. The character Johnson plays in that series, Pike Trickfoot, actually originated in the 2015 web series Critical Role in which Johnson and a group of other professional voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons live on Twitch and YouTube. Pike Trickfoot was a part of Critical Role‘s first D&D campaign, and when that campaign ended Johnson would voice a brand new character in each of Critical Role‘s consecutive campaigns, but once it was decided that The Legend of Vox Machina would adapt Critical Role‘s first campaign to television, Johnson decided to return to the role of Pike in animated form.

Meanwhile Johnson also appeared in films like Richard Linklater’s mockumentary Fast Food Nation (2006), the Oscar-nominated period drama The Help (2011), Marvel’s The Avengers (2012) and Joss Whedon’s modern Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing (2012) and she continued appearing in TV shows like Monk, CSI, Dirt, The Mentalist, Cold Case, Dollhouse, Lie to Me, Drunk History, The Killing, Private Practice and Masters of Sex. But she finally got her first main live-action role since the nineties when she was cast as FBI forensic specialist Patterson in the NBC crime drama Blindspot, which ran for five seasons from 2015 to 2020.

However the most famous character Ashley Johnson ever played is arguably a video game character, when she was cast as the voice and motion-capture performer behind Ellie in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (2013) for the PlayStation 3. Not just a great role but one of the best characters in video game history in a game that many consider one of the best video games ever made. The game was so popular that Johnson would end up reprising the role in the 2014 expansion pack The Last of Us: Left Behind and in the 2020 sequel The Last of Us Part II for the PlayStation 4.

One other highlight in Ashley Johnson’s career is one that many TV viewers may have missed the significance of. The live-action television adaptation of The Last of Us which first aired on HBO in 2023 stars Bella Ramsey as Ellie, and a flashback sequence in the first season featured Ashley Johnson in the role of Ellie’s mom! The scene, which showed Ellie’s literal birth, was a nice symbolic nod to how Ashley Johnson gave birth to the video game character who Bella Ramsey would eventually end up playing a decade after The Last of Us was first released. Bella Ramsey, by the way, would knock it out of the park playing Ellie just as much as Ashley Johnson did. But that’s a whole other article.