How The Last of Us created the abandoned mall for “Left Behind”

The latest episode of The Last of Us took viewers back in time to the night when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) was first infected with the cordyceps virus. After her best friend and first crush Riley (Storm Reid) returns from a long absence and convinces Ellie to skip out of school, the pair head deep into the Boston Quarantine Zone for a magical night at an abandoned mall. It was a stunning adaptation of The Last of Us: Left Behind video game expansion.

Part of what made the episode so effective was the setting. “Left Behind” recreated the mall from Naughty Dog’s highly acclaimed video game, with a plethora of easter eggs and subtle references included. However, it also had plenty of real-world stores which didn’t feature in the game, adding an extra layer of realism. Production designer John Paino talked to Variety about all the different things he and his team had to create to bring the mall to life, including building around 20-25 storefronts for everything from Panda Express to Footlocker and Victoria’s Secret.

“We got to pick and create these stores. It was great to use their logos, and we could play with what they are, the luxury stores and the codes behind them. Creating the creepy American Girl store was fun to make,” Paino recalled. One of the goals was to show both the wonder and sadness of the mall for Ellie, who was born after humanity fell to the cordyceps plague and had never seen one in operation. “She’s fascinated with lingerie and can’t believe that people had the time for that, but it’s sad because she’s denied what is typical for us, such as understanding the bigger world outside of trying to stay alive.”

The Last of Us mall location — What mall was The Last of Us filmed in?

To create this mall set, The Last of Us used an actual abandoned mall that they found in Calgary, Canada, where the show was filmed. Showrunner Craig Mazin discussed the mall set at length on the latest episode of The Last of Us Podcast, revealing how the production scored a major win by finding the mall…but still had huge challenges to make it look as expansive as the one from the game, which is designed to look like a typical large American mall with multiple floors.

"We got kind of lucky. To an extent. There was a mall in Calgary that was scheduled for demolition. So on the one hand, it was great because they basically said, “You can do whatever you want. You can break up the floors, you can gack up the whole place with mud and vines and everything. And you have the run of it for shooting as long as you want throughout the day.” The problem was the mall itself was not great. (Laughs)"

Co-showrunner Druckmann, who wrote “Left Behind” as well as The Last of Us video games, called the place “a little sad.” Mazin agreed. “It was a sad mall. It was a one-story mall. There was only one area, like at the very end of the mall where there was an escalator, which obviously we used, that went up to this one little extra taller section that led into like, a Winners I believe, which is this Canadian kind of Target-ish sort of store, and then like a clinic. It was really sad up there.”

Druckmann paints the picture of what it was like on that tiny escalator landing: “But if you’re standing at the top of that escalator looking out, you just see a wall. Because there was no second floor, everything like, tilts down and goes down to the first floor.”

This’s interesting, because one of the most breathtaking shots of the entire episode is the moment when the mall first lights up while Ellie stares on in awe from the second story. As it turns out, that specific shot wasn’t filmed in the mall at all; it was rendered almost entirely with visual effects.

“The shot where we’re behind Ellie and we see that mall coming on, that wasn’t at the mall, that was on a soundstage,” Mazin revealed. “We built a little railing, and then there’s just blue. And so we say to Alex Wang, our visual effects supervisor, ‘you’re gonna have to figure this out,’ and he was scared. That was one of the few times I saw him scared, because that is a very difficult thing to pull off.”

The Twilight reference hiding in The Last of Us

As for the iconic carousel which features in the episode, this was something which had to be shipped in from another mall. “It actually used to be in that mall, but when it went out of business, another mall took it, so we made a deal to rent it,” said Paino. The carousel was a perfect fit for the episode, although its center panels had ads for the Calgary Stampede rodeo festival which needed to be covered up for filming. “We put reflective panels around the center that were horrible and uneven to add to the hallucinatory feel because the whole thing is like a fever dream.”

These sorts of technical challenges also cropped up for the arcade sequence. While the interior was modeled after a number of real-life arcades, the storefront for Raja’s Arcade itself was designed to look exactly like the one from The Last of Us: Left Behind game. “We copied the name, which is in the game, and we copied the front,” Paino said. “We gave it a bit of retro-ness through games like Frogger, Tetris and Mortal Kombat.”

All of the actual arcade machines inside worked. But old-school arcade machines used cathode-ray tube (CRT) screens, which come out blurry on film. So while the machines worked fine, their screens had to be swapped out for LED screens to be more camera-friendly.

Let’s end with one more easter egg for the road. You may have noticed that in the mall there’s a big poster for a fictional movie called Dawn of the Wolf. Posters and conversations about that movie crop up throughout The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II video games. It was another fun reference that Paino enjoyed sneaking into the episode. “It’s this nod to Twilight,” he said. “It was such a mall thing to have and fun to get that in.”

As Paino points out, this isn’t the first time that Dawn of the Wolf has appeared in the show. “We had a movie theater that you didn’t see much of in the first episode, and people are pouring out of that, but it was playing there.”

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

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