The Last of Us, HBO’s zombie drama, has plenty of shocking moments, particularly in Season 2.
Speaking at Deadline Contenders at HBO Max, the series’ stars including Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey and Kaitlyn Dever, as well as creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, revealed the moments performed by others that surprised them the most.
The second season picks up five years after the events of the first, with Ramsey’s Ellie and Pascal’s Joel, who has become somewhat of a surrogate father to the wayward teen, easing into as much of a routine as one can in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse at a compound in Jackson, WY. However, quickly, a group of Fireflies murder Joel on the outskirts of town as revenge for his own murder spree to save Ellie at the Salt Lake City hospital that left their loved ones dead. Ellie then chases down Dever’s Abby and her crew in Seattle to avenge Joel.
Speaking at Deadline Contenders at HBO Max, Mazin said, “I don’t know how Kaitlyn was looking at Pedro, turned to look at golf clubs, turned back and a tear fell. I don’t know how she did it. Perfect.”
Watch the panel conversation, which also included guest star Joe Pantoliano and editor Timothy Good, below, and scroll down for photos from the event.
Ramsey referenced a porch scene with Ellie and Joel – a flashback – when Joel confesses what he did to the Fireflies at the hospital and she is devastated because it means there will never be a cure.
“I don’t know how on the porch scene [Pedro] does the perfect little lip chuckle. It breaks my heart every single time,” she said.
Pascal, for his part, filibusters and doesn’t answer the question, apart from muttering about the porch scene, Bella and Kaitlyn.
For Dever, her wow moment was “when Joel is lying there dead.” “I don’t know how you guys did that moment. I had to leave the room. I couldn’t watch it,” she said.
Druckmann’s most shocking scene was when Pascal’s Joel leads Joe Pantoliano’s Eugene through the woods before he kills him.
After Eugene realizes his fate, he says he needs to see his wife, Gail, one more time, and Joel delivers a potent message.
“There’s that moment when they’re by the lake, and Pedro says, ‘If you love someone, you can always see their face.’ The camera closes in on Joey’s face, and he takes this breath and relaxes, and then there’s little eye twitch, and that eye twitch made it so believable and so emotional,” said Druckmann.
Bella Ramsay
Michael Buckner
(L-R) Kaitlyn Dever, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey
Michael Buckner
Neil Druckmann, Pedro Pascal and Joe Pantoliano
Michael Buckner
Kaitlyn Dever
Michael Buckner
Bella Ramsey
Gilbert Flores
Neil Druckmann
Michael Buckner
Kaitlyn Dever
Michael Buckner
Joe Pantoliano
Michael Buckner
Timothy A. Good
Michael Buckner
Joe Pantoliano
Gilbert Flores
Druckmann, who is head of creative at Naughty Dog, the video game studio behind the original game, said the series has allowed them to “unplug from these characters and get into other perspectives” that it wasn’t able to get into in the game.
“Looking back now at Season 1 and Season 2 … the show really sings when it’s deeply faithful to the source material and expands on it in this really beautiful way,” he added.
His co-creator Mazin said the success of the series comes down to the community that has been created behind the scenes.
“I will say that no matter what you write, if you’re writing a show that is about people that love each other and care for each other, I just don’t believe it’s going to work if on the other side of the camera, people don’t love each other and care for each other,” he said.
He said that he saw that the first day Ramsey and Pascal met. “I never expected that there would be the intensity of that bond between them,” he added.
Mazin said it also applied when Dever arrived. “Then when we bring new people in, we try to create as much of a warm cocoon as we can for everyone, because it’s a hard show to make. We bring in poor Kaitlyn, and we’re like, ‘Welcome to Canada, kill him.’ Then I watch Kaitlyn and Pedro have this incredible bond. I do believe that the family that we’ve created is the thing that kind of keeps us all going. It’s a long, hard show to make, and so without it, I don’t know if I’d be able to do it,” he added.
Ramsey said it was about “going to the extremes and the depths and the highs and the lows.” “It’s about going to those places and not being afraid of emotion,” she said.
Pascal was asked what it was like to shoot a scene as memorable as his death scene.
“You’re so inside of it that you really kind of lose sight of what it will mean when an audience experiences episode 2 of Season 2,” he said. “None of us were really thinking about that as we were shooting it. We were just really in the story.”
Pascal also praised Dever. “I had no doubt in my mind that she was going to knock it out of the park, because I’d seen her knock everything out of the park that she’d ever done up to that point. There was a dance that we just got to really enjoy, that really to just be scene partners for something as intense as that, and right away, just like just being together, it was really fun,” he added.
Dever herself said that she focused on Abby’s grief. “I wanted people to be able to really see that and feel that, and really understand just how deep her pain is, and understand how much time she’s spent thinking about this and obsessing over it and calculating exactly what she was going to say and what she was going to do when she was face to face with Joel. That was my main focus,” she added.
The Dopesick star said she also wanted to showcase how desperate her character was.
“She just wanted her dad back so bad, and she felt like killing Joel was the only way she could feel better. There was a moment at the very end when she kills Joel … where she doesn’t feel better, and how she has to live with that. I really wanted to just be able to see the human parts of her, and that she’s not just this evil person that did this horrible thing. There’s so many more layers to her,” she added.
Pantoliano turns up in the sixth episode of the second season, despite the fact his character is only seen in a photograph in the game.
He admits that being a guest actor can be “very challenging.” “It’s like going to a cocktail party and not knowing the hosts and not knowing what the inside of the house looks like. Craig and Neil took the time to call me up and talk to me about the character backstory.”
Pantoliano then told a funny story about how he didn’t recognize Pascal, having worked with him at a reading of Gizmo Love at Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College in New York.
“Pedro said, ‘Joey Pants. You don’t remember me. I’ve been to Hoboken. I’ve been in your house, and that really loosened it all up for me,” he said.
After Pascal’s Joel tells Eugene that if he loves someone, he can always see their face, Eugene takes off his glasses, and thinking about his wife, says ‘I see her’ before being shot.
“A lot of the things that I had to say and feel were things that I didn’t have a chance to say to my mother when she left. A lot of people think you build a character or create a character, but most of the time, you’re finding yourself in the character and the emotional challenges, traumas that we all humans, go through with the uniforms that we put on every morning. This was a glorious opportunity,” he added.
The Last of Us, which scored 16 Emmy nominations, is written and executive produced by Mazin and Druckmann. It is produced by Sony Pictures Television, PlayStation Productions, Word Games, Mighty Mint, and Naughty Dog. Carolyn Strauss, Jacqueline Lesko, Cecil O’Connor, Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan, and Evan Wells also exec produce.