Ellie Smirk
Contents
About
“Ellie Smirk” is a reaction image of Ellie Williams from The Last of Us Part II looking straight at the camera with a lopsided, knowing smirk. It's also called Ellie Smirking or The Last of Us Smirk. People mostly post it in TikTok comment sections and on X, usually with a line of text above the picture setting up whatever she's smirking at.
Origin
The picture is a screenshot from The Last of Us Part II (2020), taken in the chapter "Seattle Day 1", where the player can make Ellie pull funny faces in a bathroom mirror. The earliest known upload is a Pinterest post by user iza.ᐟ from March 29th, 2024.
Redditor incredibleheadgiver reposted it to /r/thelastofus in October 2024, and it kept circulating on Pinterest and TikTok through 2025. It took off in October 2025, when X user @lesbinof shared a low-quality version from a TikTok comment captioned "When Dan and Phil upload a 'truthful video' but they're STILL pretending to be British." That tweet got over 30,000 likes in a month.
Meaning
Ellie's face says "I know exactly what's going on here, and I'm not buying it." People use it to call out someone who's obviously pretending, or to hint that they've figured out a secret. A lot of the jokes play on Ellie being a lesbian character, so it shows up often when someone is teasing a friend about being "just friends" with someone or hiding how gay they are.
The tone is teasing, not mean. It's the look you give a friend when they say something you both know isn't true.
Examples
Popularity
See also