Bill was almost played by a different actor on HBO’s The Last of Us

The latest episode of HBO’s post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us introduced viewers to survivalist Bill and his partner Frank. Over the course of 76 minutes, “Long, Long Time” explored their decades-long relationship. It was a beautifully written, beautifully filmed episode of television; this is the one that really started marking this series out as much more than your average zombie show.

A huge part of the reason why the episode worked so well were the performances by Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman as Frank and Bill. They are utterly believable in their roles and really brought their A game to this thing.

But what if I told you that Bill was originally supposed to be played by someone else?

Con O’Neill was originally supposed to play Bill instead of Nick Offerman

This info comes from the latest episode of HBO’s official The Last of Us Podcast, where showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann got into all the details behind how “Long, Long Time” came together.

“Initially the role of Bill was gonna be played by Con O’Neill, who played Bryukhanov in Chernobyl. And he wasn’t able…ultimately he couldn’t do it because he was on Our Flag Means Death,” Mazin revealed. “So, we couldn’t do it with Con, and that’s when the idea of Nick [Offerman] came around.”

It’s interesting to imagine O’Neill as Bill. He actually does look slightly closer to the version of the character from Naughty Dog’s original The Last of Us video game. His role as Blackbeard’s right hand man Izzy Hands on HBO’s pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death is similar, in that Izzy tries to always act like a tough guy while repressing unrequited feelings.

Having seen the episode though, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect Bill than Offerman. However, casting Offerman created an issue: Offerman is a straight man playing a gay character. This led to a deeper conversation about representation, as Mazin explained:

"But for Nick and for me, both straight men, it was important to say ‘Look, we can do this work. We can tell these stories with these characters. The key is you have to do your homework, and you have to talk to people who have walked in the shoes of these characters. And most importantly you have to give them room to tell you where you’ve gotten it right and where you’ve gotten it wrong, and you have to listen.’And in this episode we were very lucky because Murray [Bartlett] is a married middle-aged gay man. Peter Hoar, the director who did such a beautiful job is a married middle-aged gay man. Tim Good, the editor, is a married middle-aged man. Our unit production manager Cecil O’Connor is a married middle-aged gay man. And middle-aged, as it turns out, is more important than gay in this story, because it was important to me to tell a story about what older, longer, committed love looks like, because that’s reflective of my experience."

All of that led to casting Murray Bartlett as Frank. “So through this lens, we put out a call and say, ‘Look, we’re looking for somebody roughly between these ages, who ideally is gay to play this man,'” Mazin said. “And we saw a bunch of people, and then there was Murray and it was just…and this was before White Lotus came out. I was familiar with him, but he did such a beautiful job in the audition. And as I recall it was the speech that Frank does towards the end where he tells Bill ‘give me one last wonderful day,’ and it was gorgeous. It was an easy casting decision to make.”

Nick Offerman pushed to include Bill’s hilarious first line

It’s clear that a lot of care was put into constructing “Long, Long Time.” But that doesn’t mean things couldn’t change on the fly. Bill’s very first line in the series, where he hears the soldiers leaving his house from the inside of his bunker and mutters, “Not today, you new world order jackboot f**ks,” is something that wasn’t planned.

“That line, by the way, that was not originally dialogue,” Mazin said. “So, a lot of times when I’m writing, I will put what a character is thinking in dialogue form in italics in the action area [of the script]. So they know, ‘Okay I’m not saying these things, but this is what I’m thinking.'”

"And Nick Offerman said ‘Just one thing, Craig. Um, this line here, ‘new world order jackboot f**ks,’ I’m saying that out loud”…He was just like “A line like that must be announced to the world.”"

The Last of Us premieres new episodes on HBO and HBO Max on Sundays.

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