WEST HOLLYWOOD (AP) – Five years after the end of the first season’s events, The Last of Us picks up in Wyoming, where Joel and Ellie – played by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey – are settled into everyday life alongside an ensemble of returning characters and new faces protecting their fortress from the infected.
Ellie is at the centre of Season 2, which premiered yesterday on HBO, as she sets out on a quest for vengeance (to tell you more would be a spoiler). But Season 2’s new cast members also include some of young Hollywood’s rising stars: Isabela Merced, Young Mazino, Danny Ramirez and Kaitlyn Dever as the long-awaited Abby, a character introduced in The Last of Us: Part II video game who is set on avenging her father’s death.
Dever, who played the game with her own father, was originally in talks with series co-creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin to portray Ellie in the first season. But Abby, she now says, was the role she was meant to play. “It sort of just felt like everything fell into place the way it was supposed to,” Dever said. Ramsey and Pascal spoke with The Associated Press about the show’s hiatus, Ramsey’s increased stunt work and lessons Pascal took away from this season. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
AP: Bella, you’re stepping into more stunts, more action than we saw this past season. What was that like for you in regard to training and prep and then just mentally getting into that zone with Ellie?
RAMSEY: What I was most excited about, about going into Season 2, was getting to train and be strong. It’s nice to have a reason to exercise that isn’t just for your own personal health. I got so battered and bruised. The stunt team did everything they could to protect me, but I still somehow managed to get bruises every time. I think I commit a bit too much. It was a great time. I was absolutely exhausted the whole time but had a lot of fun doing it.
AP: Was there ever a moment or a scene where you were like, “Wow, I didn’t think I could physically do that, and I’m pretty proud of myself.”
RAMSEY: Those moments happened quite frequently, not necessarily because of the actual stunt, but because you’d pile up months of exhaustion. And then there were days where I would wake up and be like, “I don’t know how I’m gonna do today.”
PASCAL: (laughs) You couldn’t get out of bed.
RAMSEY: Yeah, there’s times – I’ve never had this experience before – where I thought my body was just going to, like, cave in. It’s this feeling of like an instability in your body. I’m like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
So, I think there was so many times during shooting where I would feel proud at the end of the day, especially when it was a stunt day, with all of this exhaustion. In some of the later episodes, there’s quite a lot of physical work, and I just had no idea how I’d do it. And then you just do, like you kind of just do it and then pay the price.
PASCAL: Pay the price for the rest of your life.
PASCAL: It was big gap for us though, too, we ended in what? June 2022, and we started in the beginning of 2024. It’s like two years.
RAMSEY: In that time, I didn’t work very much. So main growth, I think, between Season 1, Season 2 was learning how not to work, because I’d been on production since I was 11 and then worked basically nonstop up until the end of Season 1. And then there was this lull, and I didn’t do very much. So, I had to learn how to, yeah, how to be a young person and not be working, which was a challenge.
AP: Given the trajectory of Joel this season and everything that he goes through, what is one lesson or one thing that you think you will take away from this character this season?
PASCAL: I feel like Joel in Season 2 is an extreme example of what can happen if you don’t face the truth. And I think that in these teasers and in the trailer, Catherine O’Hara, who’s so incredible in the first episode that you got to see is saying, “Just, just say it. Just say the thing, face it, face your fears.” And I know as I get older, I am shocked into recognising how hard that is to do, and how dangerous it is not to do it.
