This post contains major spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2.
In the newest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, Joel (Pedro Pascal) is brutally and slowly beaten to death with a golf club by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). This also happened in The Last of Us: Part II the game, of course, so many viewers of the TV series were wondering when during Season 2 it would happen. Now that it has happened, Pascal, along with showrunners and writers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, have discussed the momentous event in great detail.
To begin with, Druckmann told Variety that the team debated when during Season 2 to have Abby kill Joel, and it was ultimately decided to do it in Episode 2 to help the story move along.
“Even in the game, there’s like an hour or something before you get to this moment. But we also knew it needed to be early enough, because this is the inciting incident for this story,” he said. “So yes, we always pick every permutation, but the later it got in the season, it just felt we were kind of dragging our feet instead of just getting to the meat of what the story is about.”
For his part, Mazin said he wanted to avoid “tormenting people” with wondering when in Season 2 this might happen, or if they might even have to wait until Season 3.
“If people know it’s coming, they will start to feel tormented. And people who don’t know it’s coming are going to find out it’s coming, because people are going to talk about the fact that it hasn’t shown up yet,” he said. “Our instinct was to make sure that when we did it, that it felt natural in the story and was not some meta-function of us wanting to upset people.”
Druckmann and Mazin also discussed why it was important to go into such graphic detail during Joel’s death, with Druckmann said the live-action nature of the TV series “makes it more brutal” than the game, which itself was incredibly gruesome. Druckmann said it is “important just to see the brutality” of what happened and how it impacts Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and others going forward.
Mazin said he was reminded of the scene from the animated version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in which Aslan’s mane is shaved and the character is left reduced and “low.”
“Joel is brought low here in a way that it’s so heartbreaking. He can’t get up off the floor, but he almost does, because Ellie asks him,” Mazin said. “It’s so upsetting. We don’t do these things to hurt people. We’re doing it because we’re with Ellie, and she’s experiencing this horrible thing that we will all experience, which is this just grief and heartbreak. It’s coming for us all.”
As for Pascal, he said in an interview Entertainment Weekly that his characters tend to get “killed a lot,” and indeed, characters he’s played in Game of Thrones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and The Equalizer 2 all get killed off. “I like to die,” he said.
Pascal also reflected on how he walked onto set during the day of filming in full makeup with his beat-up face–he said this “killed the vibe completely as everyone set their eyes on me.”
“It’s like the extreme version of, ‘Is there something on my face?’ I really could see this sort of grief take over everyone’s look in their eyes,” he said.
Now that the episode is aired and Joel is dead, Pascal said he’s “in active denial” about it.
“I realize this more and more as I get older, I find myself slipping into denial that anything is over. I know that I’m forever bonded to so many members of the experience and just have to see them under different circumstances, but never will under the circumstances of playing Joel on The Last of Us. And, no, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it because it makes me sad,” he said.
Ramsey, meanwhile, said they wrote in their journal that March 7, 2024–the day the scene was filmed–was “Kill Joel Day.” Ramsey said they watched the “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” video right up until the director called action.
“I was listening to that at full volume and danced to it, and I mouthed the lyrics right up until action,” Ramsey said. “If you watch the 10 seconds before the pre-roll, you’ll literally be able to see me singing it.”
In a behind-the-scenes video (above), Ramsey said the one and only time they’ve ever cried reading a piece of writing was for the script for the episode where Abby kills Joel.
Finally, Dever said the relationship between Joel and Ellie was “so beautiful” in Season 1, so it was “heartbreaking” to play the character to kill Joel. Dever was also going through a difficult time personally in the immediate lead-up to filming this pivotal scene.
Just weeks before shooting Joel’s death scene, Dever lost her mother Kathy to metastatic breast cancer. “I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene,” Dever said. “And my mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day. So I was sort of in a fog. I was in a daze.”
New episodes of The Last of Us air Sundays at 6 PM PT / 9 PM ET on HBO and Max.
