The stuntman who played the bloater on The Last of Us is ripped

The most recent episode of The Last of Us featured a climax where Joel, Ellie and their new friends Henry and Sam are cornered by Kathleen, a revolutionary leader who had all the firepower of the Kansas City QZ at her disposal. Just when all looks lost for our heroes, an army of infected burst from the ground, laying waste to everything in sight.

Their lot includes a bloater, an enormous, bulbous zombie who has been infected for decades; the only type of infected to reach this size. The bloater walks up to Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) and rips his head clean off, just like bloaters do to Joel in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us video game if he’s unfortunate enough to be caught by one.

Inside the bloater costume was Adam Basil, a 6’6″ English stuntman. According to prosthetics designer Barrie Gower, Basil had the perfect “build, girth and fitness” for the bloater. Just see for yourself:

Hey, if I looked like that, maybe I’d take gym selfies too.

The bloater suit from The Last of Us weighed nearly 100 pounds

Gower estimates that the bloater outfit weighed around 88 pounds, which makes it heavier than the suit actor Jamie Campbell Bower wore to play Vecna in Stranger Things. “We had a whole copy of his body that we modeled the bloater prosthetics over in modeling clay,” he told Variety. “We cast it out of a foam rubber and foam latex, which is very lightweight. It’s almost like an upholstery foam, a very spongy sort of material. That was all molded and cast in separate sections: top half, head, arms, legs. We had a team who fabricated all these parts together. We had a zipper up the back and around the waist that we could zip them together. He had all these pendulous folds of fungus which hid zippers and poppers.”

"The suit would be very soft, but very slimy and wet. We covered him in this gel-like solution, which gave him a gloss to all the fungus. We had lots of little spines and spiky hairs punched into his body, like little growths burrowing out. To get the shapes to read, we had to cover them in a gloss. It was like a texture that we were building up, so we were constantly going in and slathering them in this gloss, just so the shapes would pick up in the silhouettes. We were repeatedly going in and gelling him up more, covering him in this lube so he was nice and shiny."

There were also 10-15 stunt performers dressed as clickers and another 40-60 playing normal infected, all of them wrecking havoc in this Kansas City cul-de-sac. The Last of Us served up a zombie battle royale for the ages! We’ll see if they can top it when Episode 6 airs on HBO and HBO Max this Sunday night.

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