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If you never played The Last of Us Part II video game, last night’s episode of the game’s HBO series adaptation may have left you pretty shocked. But Pedro Pascal had been prepared for his character’s pretty devastating twist for some time. (Stop reading now if you haven’t watched Sunday night’s episode of The Last of Us.)
In the second episode of The Last of Us‘ second season, Pascal’s Joel Miller was beaten to death by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). “It’s not like they said, ‘Hey, we kill you at the beginning of season two,’” Pascal said in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly. “But it was always an understanding that it would stay true to the source material in a specific way and that the, let’s say, practical and exclusive obligation would be for season one. It was just a matter of how and when.”
Still, Pascal has been having a hard time letting go of Joel and his cast family. “I’m in active denial,” he continued. “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.”
Pascal led the series alongside Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie. Ramsey reflected on the scene in HBO’s after show for the episode: “I knew that Joel was going to die, but reading it in the script, I was dreading getting to that bit… and I cried,” they said. “I actually sobbed my little heart out. It’s the first time I’ve cried from reading a piece of writing.”
In an interview with Variety, co-creator Craig Mazin spoke about why they killed Pascal’s Joel when they did, acknowledging the pre-existing video game fandom playing a role in their decision.
“There’s a danger of tormenting people. It’s not what we want to do,” Mazin said. “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. 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.”
