My Days Leading Up To This Scene Were Horrible

Warning: MAJOR spoilers ahead for The Last of Us season 2, episode 2.The Last of Us‘ stars and showrunner reveal why season 2, episode 2’s heartbreaking moment was particularly hard for Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Abby in the series. Taking place five years after the events of the season 1 finale, the new season sees Abby leading the last of the Fireflies in search of Joel (Pedro Pascal). In The Last of Us season 2 episode 2, Abby finally confronts Joel about the murders at the Fireflies’ base and, in a heart-wrenching moment, kills him while Ellie (Bella Ramsey) watches.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Last of Us cast and co-showrunner Craig Mazin talked about the shocking moment where Abby kills Joel in season 2. Dever admitted that watching the end of Ellie and Joel’s relationship was particularly hard for her. In fact, the first scene she and Pascal did together was Joel’s death scene. Check out their comments below:

Dever: I watched you guys in season 1, and your relationship was so beautiful. And watching the end of you guys was really, really hard for me, as a viewer.

Pascal: I knew that she [Dever] had been cast, but she didn’t know that I knew. She is a gangster of an actor, and I’ve gotten to see it in all of the things that she’s done.

Dever: It was just a massive scene emotionally, and with blocking, too. There were so many moving parts and so many things to navigate.

Dever revealed that her particular filming experience was quite difficult for a personal reason. The actor lost her mother to cancer only weeks before filming the scene, and having had the funeral only days before production, her routine was disrupted. The Last of Us production team accommodated her circumstances by postponing the filming of the scene to a later date and having a closed set with only necessary personnel allowed. Read her and Mazin’s comments below:

Dever: To be as honest as possible. I will just say that my days leading up to this scene were horrible. I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene [on The Last of Us], 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.

Mazin: We said, “Take your time. Take all the time you need.” While I care extraordinarily about the show, it’s a TV show. I’m not going to disrupt someone’s grieving process for their own parent, especially [with] a show that’s partly about the grieving process. [Dever’s requests were] minimal, which were easy to honor — and then off we went.

Dever: [Donut holes and heavy amounts of coffee], that’s all I was in the mood for. Because of my life circumstances, I wasn’t actually able to do my normal routine as an actor, which was really interesting because I was kind of worried about it. Usually if I have a monologue like that, I’m memorizing it three weeks before I do it. I had a different approach, and I think that it really served the character in a lot of ways. I was able to sort of… I don’t know, just really let it go and not think about it too much because the words on the page are so powerful anyway.

What This Means For The Last Of Us Season 2’s Shocking Moment

Kaitlyn Dever Channeled Her Own Grief Into The Heartbreaking Scene

There are a few ways Joel’s death in the Last of Us show differs from the game, but it still all comes down to Abby’s ruthless determination to take him out slowly. To commit to a scene like that, Dever would’ve had to go to an extremely emotional place, which was no doubt exacerbated by her real-life grief. Still, her performance is a large part of the reason why the scene works and is as devastating as it is. The camera often lingers on her, thus allowing the audience to see every nuance of Dever’s work.

Abby, unlike the rest of her team, wanted revenge because Joel killed her father, an unarmed surgeon who was going to operate on Ellie, and her grief led to the moment when she took things too far by torturing Joel and killing him in front of Ellie. Even though Abby is a villain in Ellie’s story, the scene was partially about her inability to come to terms with her grief, and Dever, who was going through a personal loss at the time, was able to channel some of her emotions into the scene.

Our Take On Joel’s Death Scene In The Last Of Us

The Key Moment Sets Ellie On A Path

The Joel and Abby moment in The Last of Us season 2 episode 2 ending is a crucial scene that impacts the show at large, setting Ellie on a path of destruction and revenge, which is exactly what Abby set out to do after her father died. It had very little to do with healing, but a ripple of more pain and trauma. As Mazin pointed out, The Last of Us is partially about grief and what people do in a wounded world where death is the only constant.

Ellie finally experienced a little bit of stability in her life in The Last of Us season 2, episode 1, and Joel’s death takes away her safety. It’s hard to believe Joel is really dead, even though knowing this moment would eventually come. Much like the viewers, Ellie waited for Joel to get up until the moment Abby put an end to it, and even then, it was hard to process what had happened. It’s hard to have sympathy for Abby, but she did exactly what Joel and Ellie would do if the role was reversed.

Source: EW

The Last Of Us

8/10

Release Date

January 15, 2023

Network

HBO

Showrunner

Craig Mazin

Directors

Craig Mazin, Peter Hoar, Jeremy Webb, Ali Abbasi, Mark Mylod, Stephen Williams, Jasmila Žbanić, Liza Johnson, Nina Lopez-Corrado

Writers

Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin