1 week Ago By Louise Rugendyke
Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. It’s the highest compliment any fan can give the second instalment of a beloved series: “It’s just like The Empire Strikes Back ”. It just so happens that this time, the person giving the compliment is The Last of Us writer and director Craig Mazin – and he’s complimenting his own work.
“The reason I love making the show, and I devoted so much of my time on this planet to making it, is that it directly examines why we love the idea of a Luke Skywalker and a Darth Vader,” says Mazin, over Zoom from his office in Los Angeles. “We love the idea of a hero, and we love the idea of a villain, and we love the idea of a villain who, at the end, becomes a hero. “And I love that, too.
But I do remember thinking when Return of the Jedi came out, and the trilogy – as it stood then – concluded that we were all feeling really like Darth Vader was good, he reconciled with his son. And I’m like ‘what about the millions, or maybe hundreds of millions of people, that this dude murdered?’ And this kind of story goes right to the heart of that.” To be clear, there are no light-sabres in The Last of Us – just zombies – but it’s a franchise that, like Star Wars , also comes with a dedicated and vocal fan base.
Before it became HBO’s mega-hit of 2023, when it became the US streamer’s most watched debut season, it was a video game with a passionate following. Bella Ramsey (left) and Pedro Pascal at the season two premiere of The Last of Us in Los Angeles. Credit: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP Set in a post-apocalyptic America after a global pandemic has turned most of its citizens into the Infected (essentially zombies with a giant fungal growth on their head), it follows Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler, and his cargo, 13-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey).
They are trying to make it across the country to a hospital run by a rebel group, the Fireflies, who want to work out why Ellie seems to be immune to the infection. When it premiered to a global audience still punch-drunk from its global pandemic, audiences and critics were hooked on the show’s ability to flip between real terror and the pain of parenthood as Joel and Ellie formed a surrogate bond. “ The Last of Us , despite its genre plotting, is never afraid to walk right into the buzz saw – the things that I think are the most difficult for us as humans, to wrestle with,” says Mazin of the show’s appeal.
“It walks right into loss and grief. It examines the brutal difficulty of being a parent. What it means to love a child, to love your kids [and how that] love can go wrong in so many ways.
” The Last of Us creators Craig Mazin (left) and Neil Druckmann on set for season two. Season two picks up five years after the end of season one. Joel and Ellie are living in snowy Wyoming, in the walled-off town of Jackson.
Ellie is 19 years old and a sharpshooter. Joel, meanwhile, is haunted by his actions in season one and the growing divide between him and Ellie. And while life in Jackson is relatively normal – there’s a church dance! – outside the walls, the past is tracking them down and her name is Abby.
“She’s just a human being trying to fight for her life and fight for the ones that she loves, and I think you could say the same about pretty much everyone else in the show, too,” says Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Abby. “She’s just a very brave and very determined and ruthless woman, and highly trained and really emotionally strong, and that makes her quite powerful and quite a force.” Kaitlyn Dever (second from right) comes looking for Joel and Ellie in season two of The Last of Us.
More than any other character in the show, though, Abby comes with heavy baggage. When parts of The Last of Us Part II video game were leaked in April 2020, ahead of its June release, many gamers were outraged by the character, a soldier seeking vengeance over the deaths of the hospital workers at the end of season one. Those complaints continued when Dever was cast, as some thought she wasn’t big or tough enough to be the “super soldier” described in the game.
Some were also upset about a same-sex relationship in the show and the game’s creators were hit with abuse and death threats. Dever, who was in Sydney last week for the show’s premiere, understands that anger, but instead of holding her back, it helped her find a new way into the character. “I felt freedom because of my first meeting with Craig Mazin and [game creator] Neil Druckmann,” she says.
“They were really like ‘we don’t want you to be so attached to the game’. I feel like it’s very easy to sort of fall under that pressure [of the fans] because I’m a people-pleaser, and I tend to want to please everybody, but I’m learning you can’t do that, that’s not possible, especially with this stuff. Kaitlyn Dever in Sydney for the season two premiere of The Last of Us last week.
Credit: Getty Images “Everyone’s going to have their opinions. And I hope that people just enjoy what I did, and I was able to set whatever I read online aside and still focus on what I was bringing to the character.” Mazin, who also created the critically acclaimed and award-winning drama Chernobyl , is almost gleeful when asked about the backlash surrounding elements of the story.
“I love the conversation around it,” he says. “If anything, that’s a sign that the source material is interesting. It’s provocative.
I never really had much interest in writing a television show that was a self-propagating thing that would just go on and on. “So there is a version of The Last of Us , I suppose, where Joel and Ellie just go on adventures together for years, until we get bored of them. And I’m not interested in that.
And I loved what Neil Druckmann and [co-writer] Halley Grosse did with the second game. It was ballsy as hell. And I would much rather work on something that creates some pretty deep feelings than something that people don’t care about or notice.
” Does Mazin ever worry about noisy fan culture and what impact their voices have on not just creatives, but actors as well? Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in season one The Last of Us. “For that particular circumstance, it was unfortunate because I do feel like the more risks a story takes and the more dangerous the narrative gets, the more it wanders off the path of the expected and conventional, the more important it is that people experience that story as the creators intended it to be experienced,” he says. “It wasn’t like [ Game of Thrones author] George Martin indicated to people before he started selling his books ‘by the way, Ned Stark is gonna die’.
That would have ruined it. So, unfortunately, in leak culture, that can happen ..
. “It’s important for us as creators to give people the space to love things and to hate things and to come to them on their own terms. I deeply regret the way some people will attack actors for their appearance or their religion or their nationality, I think every reasonable person understands this is not the way to go, but if people want to go after a show or movie because they don’t like the plot, or they don’t like what’s happening with the characters, that’s their right.
“Our job is to try and make the thing that makes us feel the most as creators and it worked for season one – not for everyone, but for a whole lot of people – it worked, and we are hoping that once again, people will have a lot of feelings and a deep experience and they’re watching something that actually is worth their time.” As for Dever, the idea she’s starring in The Empire Strikes Back , is hilarious. Does that make her Darth Vader? “Oh, goodness, I don’t know,” she says, laughing.
“Maybe, I don’t know. I’ll leave that up to the peeps.” Season two of The Last of Us premieres on Max from April 14.
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