The Last of Us boss talks about casting Abby for season 2

The first season of The Last of Us dropped earlier this year on HBO and absolutely crushed it. Not only was it easily the best video game adaptation most people had yet seen, on film or on TV, it was a great show in its own right; a deeply felt, well-produced drama about a pair of survivors — Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) — trying to get from one end of the U.S. to the other without being chomped up by zombies.

Season 1 was based on the game The Last of Us by Naughty Dog. Season 2, which is currently on hold due to the writers and actors strikes in Hollywood but very much coming, will be based on The Last of Us Part II. That’s very interesting to a lot of gamers, because while the first game received more or less universal acclaim, the second was greeted by a storm of backlash online that rivaled the furor over the final season of Game of Thrones. Google it sometime; s*it got crazy.

Is showrunner Craig Mazin worried about the show getting a similar kind of backlash when it debuts season 2? “[S]ometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between emotion because they care and backlash,” Mazin told The Hollywood Reporter. “But neither I nor [The Last of Us creator Neil Druckmann] make things with that in mind.

"There are also times during the season where we think they’re probably gonna be annoyed with us, but later they’ll get it. Like until you saw Ellie and Joel properly fuse, a lot of viewers were like, “Uh, she’s annoying.” And I’m like, “Yeah, exactly! She’s annoying and you don’t like her — just like Joel finds her annoying and doesn’t like her.” Until he does, and would now kill everyone for her, just like how you feel at the end, because that’s how good Bella is."

It should be noted that while there was a huge backlash to The Last of Us Part II when it came out in 2020, history has mostly vindicated the game, with the general consensus being that the bold plot twists were good choices even if they inspired fury among fans at the time. That makes it different from the final season of Game of Thrones, where the consensus has more or less settled in the opposite direction.

How many seasons will The Last of Us run?

In any case, Mazin and Druckmann are planning to adapt the events of The Last of Us Part II over the course of multiple seasons of television, whereas the first game only took one season. That said, the question of how many more seasons of The Last of Us we’re going to get remains open. “It can end up being three or five,” Mazin said. “But four seems like a good number.

"Some seasons, because of the story we’re telling, will need fewer episodes and some will need more. The best news is the audience wants more. We will not indulge a desire for more simply to make them happier when they hear how many episodes are announced. And if they don’t like how many episodes are in a season because they want more, well, OK. But when all is said and done, I think the wisdom of how we lay it out will hopefully be clear. I don’t know if any season will actually have the same amount of episodes. But, whatever, the number’s not important. What’s important is when they get to the end of the season, they’re like, “That was a good season.”"

So what exactly makes The Last of Us Part II such a huge and controversial game? I won’t give away spoilers, but a lot of it comes down to a character named Abby. When asked if they had cast Abby yet, Mazin simply laughed and said “maybe.”

"The strike stopped us in our tracks. Things were in process. Look, Abby was the first role that we wanted to tackle. We’ve got a pretty good track record of making major cast announcements and people going, “Really?” which will probably continue. So people may disagree, but I think we got it right so far and the audience seems to feel we got it right and the Academy seems to feel we got it right."

Joel’s killing spree in The Last of Us season 1 was “technically immoral”

We’ve got a while to wait before season 2. In the meantime, Mazin gave his takes on a few things from season 1, including his regrets about the premiere episode, which was actually meant to be two episodes in the beginning; they ended up getting mashed together to make one super-sized premiere.

“I do wish we had the foresight to know the original first two episodes were going to become one long episode,” Mazin said. “Some things got a little bit kludgy or lost on the cutting room floor that I wish hadn’t been. Still, first episodes notoriously go wonky and ours didn’t really, and Neil and I are incredibly satisfied with how the season turned out — particularly the core, which were Pedro and Bella’s performances. Their relationship was exactly what we hoped for.”

Joel and Ellie start out at odds but eventually become a kind of surrogate family. Mazin’s personal favorite scene from the first season is from the season finale, where Joel talks about how their relationship has helped him:

"I have a certain place in my heart for a scene in the last episode that I ended up shooting because our director had gotten COVID. It’s the scene where Joel reveals to Ellie why he has that scar on his head. She says, “Time heals all wounds.” And he says, “It wasn’t time that did it.” I’m particularly proud of that scene because, first, it’s simple — it’s two people talking, which is my favorite. They’re not even moving when it gets really good, so everything else goes away and it’s just about their connection. And I’m so proud of the performance that Pedro and Bella delivered in that moment. It was also the third-to-last day of shooting, so it was the culmination of a calendar year of shooting and the culmination of the work that they had done with each other as professionals, but also as human beings. It was so real and it was so beyond. I just love it."

In fact, Joel’s love for Ellie goes so deep that he’s willing to murder a hospital full of well-meaning freedom fighters to save her life, even if it means giving up the chance to end the zombie apocalypse. The morality of this killing spree is a big point of discussion among The Last of Us fans, and you can bet that Mazin has thoughts. “It’s certainly selfish,” he said. “But the question is, ‘Is it wrong?’ It’s the question that we are forced to ask ourselves and I’m not sure we can answer it easily. Because any parent, if somebody comes to them and says, “I’m going to press a button, and either your kid dies or some other kid dies,” I don’t know any parent who would say, “My kid.”

"Press the button and either your kid dies or two other kids die, then this is starting to get itchy. And underneath it is an exploration of love and what love does to us. It defines our humanity, but it also separates us from an algorithm. The Trolley Problem is a problem because it’s a problem [whereby a person is given the choice to divert a runaway trolley that will kill five people onto a different track where it will kill one person]. This act Joel commits is a flawed act. From an objective point of view, let’s call it “technically immoral.” However, this is where the kind of simple exploration of morality begins to break down: If there’s something that we say is immoral and yet no one is capable of not doing it, then what is the point of defining it as immoral? So I have tremendous sympathy for Joel’s decision. I also have tremendous antipathy for Joel’s decision. And that is what echoes forth and why we’re making more The Last of Us."

There are no plans to show us The Last of Us deleted scenes

We’ll probably be waiting for The Last of Us season 2 for a while, very likely until 2025. Might Mazin and company at least release some deleted scenes from the first season in the meantime? According to Mazin, no:

"I don’t think so. It’s that thing where you love something so much you wish you could see more of it, and then you see more, and then you’re like, “Oh, actually I get why they cut that.”"

Even if I get whey they cut it, I’d still like to see it, for whatever it’s worth.

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