After touchdown 16 Emmy nominations for season two of The Last of Us, its stars and inventive staff took a glance again on 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 on the occasion, with the season’s second episode — which sees Dever’s Abby brutally murder Pascal’s principal character, Joel — the topic of a lot of the dialog.
“You’re so within it that you just actually form of lose sight of what it can imply when a TV viewers experiences episode two of season two,” Pascal informed the gang, and provided that Joel additionally dies within the online game that the collection is predicated on, “I’m like, ‘Effectively, everybody is aware of that is gonna occur,’ as a result of I’ve simply been dwelling with it for such a very long time. I suppose the context of that’s that none of us had been actually interested by that as we had been capturing it. We had been identical to actually within the story.”
It was a shock to many followers, although, and is a pivotal half within the collection; after an look in season two’s first episode, the second ep serves because the formal introduction to Abby — who will take over because the lead character for the upcoming third season — as a younger lady out for revenge after Joel killed her father.
“Kaitlyn simply got here in, I had little doubt in my thoughts that she was going to knock it out of the park, as a result of I’d seen her knock all the things out of the park that she’d ever completed as much as that time,” Pascal continued. “So there was a dance that we simply received to take pleasure in that actually, to simply be scene companions for one thing as intense as that, and instantly simply be in it collectively. It was actually enjoyable.”
The star additionally famous how he and Ramsey — whose characters aren’t on good phrases in season two — had been aside for some time between the present’s first and second seasons, “as a result of we’d been collectively for a yr, after which we noticed one another right here and there — we’re at all times holding in contact, however we had been actually, form of like bodily aside for a very long time, after which after we received again collectively, our characters weren’t collectively. That was simply actually unusually painful in a method that I hadn’t customized on earlier jobs. So it was all form of magical in a form of painful method which helps you play it.”
Mazin counseled Dever for her efficiency within the violent scene, emphasizing, “I don’t understand how Kaitlyn was taking a look at Pedro, turned to take a look at golf golf equipment, turned again and a tear fell. I don’t understand how she did it.” Dever threw the praise proper again at Pascal and Ramsey, for the scene when Ramsey’s Ellie sobs over Joel’s lifeless physique.
When “Joel is mendacity there lifeless, I don’t understand how you guys did that second,” she informed the pair. “I needed to depart the room. I couldn’t watch it. I don’t understand how you probably did it.”
Dever additionally defined that when it got here to her character, “a very powerful factor to me once I was going to play Abby and doing the prep for her is simply actually specializing in her grief. I needed folks to have the ability to actually see that and really feel that and actually perceive simply how deep her ache is, perceive how a lot time she’s spent interested by this and obsessing over it and calculating precisely what she was going to say and what she was going to do when she was face-to-face with Joel.”
“There was a second on the very finish when she kills Joel, and I feel that there’s a second the place she doesn’t really feel higher and now she has to dwell with that,” she continued. “So I actually needed to simply have the ability to see the human elements of her and that she’s not simply this evil person who did this horrible factor.”
