Nick Offerman is best known for his role as Ron Swanson on the sitcom Parks and Recreation. He was hilarious on that show, but he’s also capable of tearing our hearts out with a powerful drama. If you don’t believe, watch him on HBO’s new zombie drama The Last of Us, in the episode “Long Long Time.”
Offerman plays Bill, a survivalist who manages to find lasting love amidst the zombie apocalypse. It’s an early contender for guest performance of the year, but Offerman almost didn’t take the part, as he said on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“I’m a huge fan of [The Last of Us co-creator Craig Mazin], and so I knew, ‘Here’s a script from Craig and it’s for his new show and it’s going to be something very special,'” Offerman said. “It was in a time when I didn’t have time to go do it, so it was this immediate dilemma. I didn’t even want to read it.”
That’s when Offerman’s wife Megan Mullally — who herself is an actor who’s appeared on shows like Will & Grace — stepped in. “She said, ‘You’re going to Calgary, buddy. Have fun! You have to do this.'”
In general, Offerman is very happy with the response the episode has gotten. “It’s a tsunami of wonderful, generous plaudits,” he said. “The episode began airing on Sunday. We had 6.4 million viewers, and HBO… they are so not f—ing around that they send me on the Jimmy Kimmel show on Wednesday to cull the stragglers. They’re like, ‘The 17 of you who haven’t seen it yet, you’re in for a treat.'”
The Last of Us Episode 3 was originally two hours long
“Long Long Time” was — appropriately enough — long for a episode of television, clocking in an over an hour. But as showrunner Craig Mazin explained to Deadline, the original cut was even longer, and more painful.
“ Peter Hoar did his director’s cut with our editor, Tim Good, which was quite long,” Mazin said. “When they sent it to me, I think it was almost two hours or something like that. So, I was like, oh, that’s probably not good.
"And I sat down, but I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll watch the two-hour version of this episode.’ And I cried so hard that at one point, I actually said out loud, ‘Ow.’ I mean, it hurt. I cried so hard it hurt. And I thought, ‘Well, if these guys can do this to me and I wrote this f***ing thing, then I think it might work pretty well on other people’."
Mission accomplished.
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