Stars Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey & Kaitlyn Dever open up about the second season of TV phenomenon The Last of Us
In the inaugural season of The Last of Us, an unlikely duo built a partnership based on trust and friendship. Joel (Pedro Pascal), a hardened middle-aged survivor of a brutal pandemic, had been tasked with bringing immune teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across the U.S., in order to use her in the creation of a vaccine. But when Joel discovers the key to the vaccine is Ellie’s brain, he decides to save her at the cost of possibly saving the masses — a risky move that could also put an end to their friendship, if Ellie ever were to find out the truth.
As the second season begins, five years after the events at the Fireflies headquarters, the secret is still safe, but the relationship between these two is none the less strained. “There’s an incredibly painful distance between the two of them,” says Pascal. On the upside, they have made their way to the commune in Jackson, Wyoming, run by his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley), and life seems a lot more settled than it was five years ago. “The only real turbulence there is the way that you raise a son and how you raise a daughter,” says Luna. “You get to examine a lot of that because our family is now these five people: Maria and I, [our son] Ezra, his uncle Joel and his cousin Ellie.”
The idea of family also extends to the community they are fostering. “It’s really interesting, growing the community: who we let in, how we protect those that we love, how we care for the children that we’re rearing and trying to send them in the right direction. What elements of danger are we allowing them to encounter so that they can develop their skills?” As Ellie’s uncle-of-sorts, Tommy is more open to Ellie defending the community than Joel is. “I see her capabilities as a warrior,” says Luna. “And while Joel would very much like to keep her as close to him, and as protected, as possible, I’m allowed to have a longer leash that can just absolutely be snapped at any moment because Ellie’s a very convincing person.”
There is, of course, danger looming — not just in the shape of the deadly fungus that still threatens humanity, but in the form of Fireflies who want to avenge Joel’s bloody escape in the first season finale. Chief among them is Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever (a character familiar from the video game upon which the series is based), whose lethal mission in the series — unlike in the game — is not ambiguous in the slightest. “In the game, you play as Abby, so you immediately form an empathic connection with her because you’re surviving as her. We can withhold certain things and make it a mystery that will be revealed later in the story,” co-creator Neil Druckmann explains. “We couldn’t do that in the show because you’re not playing as her, so we need other tools. And that context gave us a shortcut.”
For Dever, who once was hired to play Ellie in the now-scrapped film adaptation of The Last of Us, joining the series as Joel and Ellie’s adversary was a trippy experience. “I loved what the two of them [creators Craig Mazin and Druckmann] did in this first season. It was just pure magic,” she says. “I was a fan of the game. It was a real bonding moment for me and my dad playing it together. And to have it come back around, 10-plus years later . . . it was something I would always think about, and when it did come back around, it felt surreal. It really felt like, ‘Things that are meant to be in your life will happen if they’re supposed to.’ ”
It is not lost on the cast that the first season of the series gave harrowing context to a real-life pandemic and, as the second season examines conflict and where it starts, democracy is now in question in places that took it for granted. Yet, Pascal feels like The Last of Us offers viewers an escapist way of processing the challenges of the world. “I think storytelling is cathartic in so many ways, always has been,” he says. “It’s the way that the human beings have made testimony to life. My development is based on books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, and television that I’ve watched. [The show] is very much going to reflect the human experience. And under such extreme circumstances, I think that there’s a healthy and sometimes sick pleasure in a safe space to see human relationships under crisis and in pain and intelligently draw political and societal allegory from that.”
After the success of the first season, the cast knows that whatever is to come, all eyes are on them. “It’s a little bit scary,” says Ramsey. “I’m so aware of season two coming out and everybody looking at it and looking at me. But it’s exciting and I’m trying to see it as a celebration of all the hard work that we did.” For Pascal, the experience has been equally life-altering. “This job definitely created a new chapter in my life in a profound way,” he says. “I think because of the personal experience I had making the show. And then, of course, the way the show was received. It will never happen again.”
The Last of Us airs Sunday, April 20, on HBO Canada