This story was published in the January 14 issue of the Listener and republished as Melanie Lynskey has been nominated for two Emmys, including guest actress in a drama for The Last of Us.
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey starred in different seasons of Game of Thrones and never met. But their characters had something in common. Both were crushed to death by giant creatures.
“My head was well squished by the time you showed up,” Pascal says to Ramsey as the jovial pair share a Zoom press call about their new show.
Still, even if both made grim exits, Thrones boosted their careers. For Chilean-American Pascal, that meant lead roles in Narcos and the title role in the hit Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian. For English teenager Ramsey, there have been more period productions like Becoming Elizabeth and the lead in the charming medieval comedy feature Catherine Called Birdy, playing a character even more precocious than Thrones’ Lyanna Mormont.
Now the pair are starring together in another show that puts them at risk of again dying in not a nice way. And as with their Star Wars and Thrones roles, their new characters come with in-built pop-culture kudos and plastic figurines.
They are Joel and Ellie. Those names ringing any bells will depend on your familiarity with The Last of Us, the survival thriller video game considered one of the best ever. Neither Pascal nor Ramsey knew much about it before auditioning. Though Pascal says he had some teenage nephews who freaked out when he told them he might be in a The Last of Us series. “I understood immediately. Okay. This is a big deal.”
It has been so for a decade. Some 30 million copies of the game’s various versions have been sold since the first was released for the PlayStation 3 in 2013, with a PS5 iteration released a few months ago.
Now, as streaming platforms snatch up long-running videogame titles to turn into genre content – or, in some cases, buy game-development companies – The Last of Us arrives as HBO’s first big drama of 2023. With an estimated US$100 million budget, its nine-episode first season was filmed in Alberta, Canada.
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic 2033 where the human population has been decimated by a fungal-brain infection that turns the infected into blind but networked mutant cannibals. The non-infected have turned America into a country of quarantine zones and warring factions.
“Not just another zombie game” has been a common headline for The Last of Us since the first reviews. The surrogate father-daughter relationship between Joel and Ellie as they travel across the US – she’s seemingly immune to the disease, so could help scientists develop an antidote – and how the game treated its other characters won it acclaim for its emotional involvement and storytelling.
Game creator Neil Druckmann cited movies such as The Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men and another Cormac McCarthy story, The Road, as influences. Given its popularity, it was inevitable that it would become a screen drama. Also on the Zoom call, Druckmann says he spent years on a movie adaptation with different people “and kept failing at it”.
Wary of it becoming yet another mediocre video game movie, he eventually wondered about a television series instead. Enter screenwriter Craig Mazin, a diehard Last of Us fan. He’d spent the previous 20 years bashing out gag-filled scripts for the likes of the Scary Movie horror parodies and the Hangover films. But then he wrote Chernobyl, the 2019 HBO miniseries about the Soviet-era nuclear-power-plant disaster, which won him a bookcase full of awards – and it was proof he could give a world-in-meltdown scenario a human touch.
Still, the pair, who worked on the scripts during the first year of the Covid pandemic, faced various pressures – making “not just another zombie game” into “not just another zombie television show” was one. And creating a show that appealed equally to those who loved the game and those oblivious to it.
“But the pressure outside was nothing compared with the pressure inside,” says Mazin. “As somebody who loves the game, I was not going to allow myself to hurt it. If our show is bad, it hurts The Last of Us. I won’t hurt The Last of Us.”
Druckmann and Mazin say the real-life pandemic wasn’t a factor when it came to writing the scripts.
“We can’t help but talk about Covid when you’re in the middle of a Covid pandemic,” says Druckmann. “But if anything felt like it was too familiar, or it’s being too specific about this particular outbreak, we would probably err on the side of taking it out because we didn’t want to make a Covid-19 show. We wanted to make a show about the tension, the stress and the pressure these characters are feeling.”
Pascal’s role means, as he does in The Mandalorian, he’s again playing the guardian to a vulnerable companion while on a dangerous journey. He’s not worried about being typecast.
“I love that it can be compared – a grumpy protector who is softened by the innocence of his reluctant responsibility. It’s a great double-dip for me.”
The wider cast includes Murray Bartlett (from The White Lotus, season one), Nick Offerman, and New Zealander Melanie Lynskey, who plays a revolutionary leader named Kathleen who wasn’t in the game. One character, resistance leader Marlene, was voiced and motion-captured for the game by actress Merle Dandridge, who reprises her role in the show. “It was like taking an old pal for a new ride,” she says.
This time, she could actually see the Infected, played by dozens of actors and dancers who would spend five hours in make-up having their fungal prosthetics fitted.
“They howled and chased us and it was terrifying,” says Pascal, “but also really quite sweet, because some really couldn’t see through some of the prosthetics and so we would gently take their hand and help them to their mark and they would very gratefully and gently get into position and we would get into our position and they would say ‘action’ and it was ‘EEEEUUURGGH!’ … it was pretty brilliant.”
Ramsey: “They were terrifying every single time, even after being in five hours of prosthetics and getting up stupidly early. That was actually the scariest part – how they just never seemed to get tired.”
The Last of Us is available to stream on Neon.
