After landing 16 Emmy nominations for season two of The Last of Us, its stars and creative team took a look back at the emotional season at HBO Max’s Nominee Celebration on Sunday.
Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Kaitlyn Dever, Joe Pantoliano and editor Timothy Good joined co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann at the event, with the season’s second episode — which sees Dever’s Abby brutally murder Pascal’s main character, Joel — the subject of much of the conversation.
“You’re so inside of it that you really kind of lose sight of what it will mean when a TV audience experiences episode two of season two,” Pascal told the crowd, and given that Joel also dies in the video game that the series is based on, “I’m like, ‘Well, everyone knows this is gonna happen,’ because I’ve just been living with it for such a long time. I guess the context of that is that none of us were really thinking about that as we were shooting it. We were just like really in the story.”
It was a surprise to many fans, though, and is a pivotal part in the series; after an appearance in season two’s first episode, the second ep serves as the formal introduction to Abby — who will take over as the lead character for the upcoming third season — as a young woman out for revenge after Joel killed her father.
“Kaitlyn just came in, 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,” Pascal continued. “So there was a dance that we just got to enjoy that really, to just be scene partners for something as intense as that, and right away just be in it together. It was really fun.”
The star also noted how he and Ramsey — whose characters are not on good terms in season two — had been apart for a while between the show’s first and second seasons, “because we’d been together for a year, and then we saw each other here and there — we’re always keeping in touch, but we were really, kind of like physically apart for a long time, and then when we got back together, our characters weren’t together. That was just really strangely painful in a way that I hadn’t personalized on previous jobs. So it was all kind of magical in a kind of painful way which helps you play it.”
Mazin commended Dever for her performance in the violent scene, emphasizing, “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.” Dever threw the compliment right back at Pascal and Ramsey, for the scene when Ramsey’s Ellie sobs over Joel’s lifeless body.
When “Joel is lying there dead, I don’t know how you guys did that moment,” she told the pair. “I had to leave the room. I couldn’t watch it. I don’t know how you did it.”
Dever also explained that when it came to her character, “the most important thing to me when I was going to play Abby and doing the prep for her is just really focusing on her grief. I wanted people to be able to really see that and feel that and really understand just how deep her pain is, 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.”
“There was a moment at the very end when she kills Joel, and I think that there’s a moment where she doesn’t feel better and now she has to live with that,” she continued. “So 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.”