published by Deadline
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.
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.
