The second season of HBO’s The Last of Us is set to premiere in mere weeks, and the marketing train for the series is well out of the station.
One of the show’s promotional events was a press conference that Reactor attended. There, several cast members as well as co-creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin took questions from those in attendance. While the discussions didn’t go into spoiler territory, some answers did shed light on the experience of shooting season two, including some changes made from the video game it’s based on. Here are three big moments from the discussion.
Pedro Pascal Had an “Unhealthy Mindset” Heading into Season Two
Season two of the show takes place five years after the season one finale. Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are estranged, to say the least, which made shooting bittersweet for Pascal, even though his first scene was a one-on-one with Ramsey. “There’s an incredibly painful distance between the two of them in the playing of the scene, but we still got to be on set and around and laughing and stuff like that,” he said.
He later added, “My mindset was grateful to being 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 I kind of feel their pain, so I suppose I was in an unhealthy mindset.”
The Show Changes How We Meet Abby
In the video game The Last of Us Part II, players don’t know the backstory of Abby until well into the story. In the series, we find out who Abby is immediately. Druckmann explained why:
“There are two reasons why we change certain contexts or move certain things up in the story, one of which in the game. When you start 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 a mystery that will be revealed later in the story.
We couldn’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. Something similar happened in season one, when game one starts with you playing as Sarah, and we didn’t have to do a lot of heavy lifting for you to care about Sarah, because you’re playing as her, you’re experiencing the outbreak as her. In the show, we had to spend quite a bit of time to achieve something similar. So that was one reason.
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 yours that context right off the bat.”
Season Two Will Have a “Different” Episode, Similar to the Bill and Frank Episode from Season One
Mazin was clear that he and Druckmann didn’t set out to create another unique episode in season two: “One thing that Neil and I talked about was just making sure that we didn’t just say, ‘Oh, you know, that Bill and Frank episode—people really like that, let’s do a very special episode of The Last of Us, season two.’ It just has to happen as it happens.”
One episode, however, ended up fitting that bill for story reasons. “I will say that there is a gorgeous episode this season, directed by Neil, that is different,” Mazin added. “It’s not Bill and Frank, but it is, in its own way, its own thing because it needed to be, and…just you wait. Just you wait.”
Season Two of The Last of Us starts streaming on Max on April 13, 2025.
