The second season premieres April 14 on Max and will feature seven episodes.
The relationship between Ellie and Joel encounters turbulence in the second season of ’The Last of Us‘. Played by Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, the characters face their pasts while confronting an uncertain future, overshadowed by infection and humanity’s collapse. In this post-apocalyptic world, everyone suffers, and Pascal himself admitted feeling that pain personally, as he revealed during a press conference in Los Angeles.
“I think there’s something really exciting about giving everyone another season of a show that everyone loved and that everyone has worked so hard on and has put so much into,” Pascal explained. “My mindset was grateful to be back and yet, at the same time, this experience, more than any other I’ve had, is hard for me to separate what the characters are going through and how it makes me feel, in a way that isn’t very healthy. And so I kind of feel their pain.” Pascal humorously added that his mental health took a hit during the filming process.
An intimate first scene
Five years separate the events of the first and second seasons. Pascal shared that it was touching for the showrunners, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, to choose a tender moment between Ellie and Joel as the first scene they filmed for the new season. “There’s incredibly painful distance between the two of them,” he remarked. Yet, the cast still shared laughs and had fun during filming. “That was incredibly comforting, that was like coming home.”
The second season of ’The Last of Us’ premieres April 13. Neil Druckmann has confirmed that spores, a crucial element from the video game, will return in these new episodes, integrated in a way that makes narrative sense.
