Joel’s Return and Other Secrets of Episode 6

This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Last of Us, now streaming on Max.

The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann was behind the camera to direct the penultimate episode of the postapocalyptic drama’s second season, and it was an imposing assignment. Within the span of an hour, Druckmann had to chronicle five years in the lives of Joel and Ellie, squeeze in a flashback to Joel’s teenage years, and create fully fleshed-out versions of Joel’s father and Gail’s husband Eugene in the span of a couple of scenes. He had to direct Pedro Pascal after his former leading man had been off on another project after Joel was killed in the season’s second episode. 

And as the chief creative force behind the two Last of Us video games, he felt had to be even more careful than usual about giving fans of the game the moments they’ve been expecting to see in live-action for years.  

Last week, Druckmann spoke with Rolling Stone about getting to direct Pascal with Bella Ramsey one more time, working with guest stars Tony Dalton and Joe Pantoliano, and whether watching Pascal and Ramsey together ever gave him any doubts about killing Joel. 

Logistically, was this filmed around the same time as the season’s first two episodes?
No. We shot out Pedro for Episode Two, then he went to work on a different project.

So even the New Year’s Eve party scenes weren’t filmed at the same time that Craig Mazin was shooting his version for the season premiere? 
We had to restage the entire thing. I jokingly told people this must have been what it felt like for Robert Zemeckis having to shoot Back to the Future II. Luckily, I had two monitors. One monitor had what Craig shot on episode one, and the other monitor had what I was shooting live. I was able to cut in certain footage from that episode, but we had to reshoot the whole thing, including the Seth argument with Ellie and Dina from Joel’s point of view.

This was a very emotional episode, and it’s also likely the last episode with a lot of Pedro and Bella together. What was it like getting to direct them in this? 
It’s such a joy. They’re so talented. They now understand these characters so much. I’m in such a unique position, because I’ve lived with these characters and these scenes for so long, and to get to revisit them in these scenes that mean so much to fans, but also to me personally… I was very nervous. I wanted to make sure I did it justice for not only the show, but just The Last of Us as a whole, and what the gamers are going to expect from these sequences coming off the game. In the moment, I was so pleasantly surprised by what they were putting in front of the camera. There’s certain moments in live-action where you have happy accidents, like you can’t plan for something. When they’re in the space capsule, and Joel is asking Ellie how he did, and then you see he has this just beautiful smile on his face, and he turns, and you see the glint of a tear in his wrinkles. You don’t see him cry; just that. We couldn’t plan for that, and the fact that we caught it, I’m like, it’s just… you just catch these beautiful moments that are just there, and then they’re gone. That is the beauty of live-action.

So Pedro had been away for a while, and then he came back to play Joel one more time. Was he more emotional than usual filming this?
Yes, although in the day-to-day, you wouldn’t feel it. But definitely, as we were getting closer to the end, you could feel this parting of the ways coming. And then the last day, specifically, it got really emotional when we finished the last shot and we hung out for a while and just hugged it out and chatted and reminisced.

When you were making the first season of the show, and watching the magic that Pedro and Bella were making together, was there ever a moment where you reconsidered the Abby storyline? Where you thought that this kind of chemistry doesn’t come along every day, and maybe you should hang onto it?
No. I knew because of their chemistry, because of what they brought, how painful this would be. And it needed to be painful to tell this story. If they didn’t have chemistry, I would have been worried about how we tell this story. So for me, it was more of a question of, that story can be complete, that story can live on its own. That’s how we made the first game. But we put in certain changes and tweaks prepping for the next story if we got the chance to tell it. And luckily, the show was successful to such a degree that HBO was, with open arms, excited to have us continue to tell the story.

I suppose the compromise version would have been to save Abby for another season or two, and in the interim just give us more Joel and Ellie adventures during the five-year gap. Was that discussed?
Yes, because we discuss everything. We even discussed what if we didn’t kill Joel, just to interrogate it. Because everything should be on the table. Everything should be interrogated to make sure we’re making the best choices for this version of the story. We even discussed, could we tell this other story, could we prolong this moment?  But the more we discussed it, the more it just felt wrong. It felt like we would only be doing it for business reasons, to maintain this feeling that people have for longer. But there wasn’t a story there to motivate it. The inciting incident, the origin of this story is Joel’s death. Any inciting incident, you have to get to it as soon as possible. What motivates this entire journey that Ellie goes on starts with Joel. 

Do you remember what was discussed about the version where you didn’t kill Joel?
I don’t, because that was a very short conversation that didn’t have any impact on us. Because we knew we were exploring something that, you know, we’re not going to get much out of this, and we didn’t.

I haven’t played the games, but friends who have, told me that the porch scene, where Ellie tells Joel that she wants to try to forgive him, doesn’t appear until the end of the second game. Why did you move it up to this point?
The reason we moved it, and the reason it wasn’t a big, difficult choice for me, is when we were making the game, we knew we wanted that scene. That scene was written. We didn’t know where that scene should go, and for a long time, it was at a very different place than the end of the game. And [it went there] only when we were finishing production of the game. It’s hard because I don’t want to talk about why we moved it to the end, because then I get into where the show ultimately goes. But it felt appropriate for it to go there. And the way the game is delivered is, you buy the game, and then you have the whole story, and you decide how you want to experience it. The game is roughly between 20 to 30 hours, depending on how you play it. You decide, do I want to play an hour a day or an hour a week, or do I want to go through 30 hours without any sleep? People have done all those different versions, but the story is all there for you. With the show the way it’s delivered, it’s one-hour-ish chunks every week, and [we knew] we’re not going to finish the story this season, then there’s a gap, potentially a multiyear gap before we continue. Therefore, there are certain setups that are paid off that we felt in our conversation of how this story would be delivered, would be too long of a wait that potentially won’t land as well as when they’re contrasted here with these events. And it will become clear when you watch episode seven and see where the show goes, of why we couldn’t wait that long to have the porch scene show up.

Earlier, you talked about having a responsibility to the people who knew and loved the game to deliver these moments that they know so well. How have you figured out how to balance that with trying to please the people like me who have not played the game and are just experiencing this as a television show?
In my conversations with Craig, we talk a lot about where the show goes. What is this show about? What is the soul of this story that, to me, must remain the same? If we lose that, then we’ve gone too far. Because it’s an adaptation, it’s a different medium, there are going to be changes. Just fundamentally. It’s a highly collaborative art, both on the game side and the show side. So the best way I can honor both is to just do the best version possible of the story, and to make sure that our destinations are the same. The meandering, how we get there, different choices, those can vary. I know people will pick those apart and some people will be OK with it. Some people won’t. That’s just the nature of the beast that is part of the package. When you do something so popular and it’s viewed by millions of people online, you’re gonna get every reaction under the sun, especially when it’s an adaptation of something people love so much. But I also know to do a good job, we have to make certain changes. It’s just fundamental to what we do. I just have to protect its soul all the way through. 

Finally, we should talk about the episode’s two notable guest stars. Let’s start with Tony Dalton.
The most charming and intimidating man on TV. It’s kind of a difficult role. It’s very short and very poignant. He has to come in and be so intimidating that you have to think that this guy might snap and hit his son. But also he has to have so much empathy, and maybe you even have sympathy for him, that this guy with the tools in front of him does the best he can to raise his kid, and he’s insecure that he might be getting it wrong. But the hope is that he’s doing better than his father, who beat the shit out of him. It was important to get this idea of not only generational trauma, but generational hope and repair. Because that gets into the porch scene. And that’s a message that Joel leaves with Ellie. When we wrote that scene, Tony Dalton was my first choice. I immediately pictured him in that role, and I remember jumping on a Zoom call with him and Craig and describing this scene to him — I was very nervous that he would say no — and he was just on board. He’s like, “That sounds awesome. When do we start?”

And Joey Pants [Joe Pantoliano]? In just a couple of minutes, he makes me cry.
It speaks to the brilliance of Joey Pants. And it’s so interesting, because when we cast him, I don’t think we gave him enough credit for how versatile he is. The scenes originally had more humor in them, because we could see Joey having this gallows humor. When he’s looking at the lake, there was a line initially where he says, “I don’t need a Bob Ross painting. I need Gail.” On paper, that’s funny, and we could see Joe doing it. But he took the performance somewhere else. There’s an innocence and a purity to it. And he just gave this beautiful performance, and it was just a joy to see. But when you’re watching the episode, you’re seeing one version of that performance. There were so many other beautiful choices that he was giving us, and it was actually hard to choose that one.