The second season of The Last of Us premieres on HBO and Max in just a couple weeks, and the stars were out in force the other day for the premiere. That includes Pedro Pascal, above, who plays world-weary zombie survivalist Joel. His surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) will also be back. She'll have a girlfriend this time around: Dina, played by Isabela Merced. Here the two of them are sharing a smile on the red carpet:
Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) is also back. Here he is with co-showrunner Craig Mazin:
Neil Druckmann produced the original video games and also serves as a co-showrunner on the series:
By far the most important new character is Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever:
Other newcomers include Jeffrey Wright as paramilitary leader Isaac...
...and Young Mazino as Ellie's friend Jesse:
And of course, we can't pull pictures from the red carpet without including one of Pascal and Ramsey together:
There will be an "incredibly painful distance" between Ellie and Joel in The Last of Us season 2
That said, although the pair are all smiles at the premiere, Ellie and Joel will be dealing with a rupture in their relationship on the show. "There’s incredibly painful distance between the two of them and the playing of the scene, but we still got to be on set and f**k around and laugh and stuff like that. And that was incredibly comforting, that was like coming home," Pascal said at a press conference we got to attend.
If you're remember, Ellie is the only person in the world of The Last of Us who's immune to the zombie fungus that has toppled society. The first season ended with Joel rescuing an unconscious Ellie from a hospital where doctors were going to perform surgery on her in hopes of creating a cure. The only catch? She'd have to die. Rather than let that happen, Joel killed everyone in his path and lied to Ellie about what happened afterward. In season 2, they'll be sorting through the complicated fallout.
“My mindset was grateful to be back and yet, at the same time, this experience, more than any other I’ve had, is hard for me to separate what the characters are going through and how it makes me feel, in a way that isn’t very healthy. And so I kind of feel their pain,” Pascal said. “I suppose I was in an unhealthy mindset."
The Last of Us is changing how we meet Abby
Without spoiling too much, in The Last of Us Part II, players switch between playing as Ellie and new character Abby. At first, we get dropped into Abby's shoes without knowing where she is or what she's doing, although we learn her intentions soon enough. During the press conference, we learned that viewers of the HBO show will learn a lot more background about Abby right up front.
“There are two reasons why we change certain context or move certain things up in the story,” explained Neil Druckmann. “One of which [is] in the game… you play as Abby. So you immediately form an empathic connection with her because you’re surviving as her. You’re running through the snow, you’re fighting infected, and we can withhold certain things and make it a mystery that will be revealed later in the story. We can’t do that in the show because you’re not playing as her. So we need other tools and that context gave us that shortcut.”
"Another reason is, where that revelation happens in the game, if we were to stick to a very similar timeline, viewers would have to wait a very, very long time to get that context. It would probably get spoiled to them between seasons and we didn’t want that. So it felt appropriate for those reasons to move that up and give viewers that context right off the bat."
As for playing Abby, Kaitlyn Dever went into it with eyes wide open; she actually was considered for the role of Ellie years ago when Druckmann was trying to turn the first Last of Us game into a movie, but that didn't work out. Still, she became a fan of the games, so she was ready when this new opportunity came along. "And it just felt right. Abby felt right. It was very cool."
The Last of Us season 2 premieres on HBO and Max on Sunday, April 13.
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