Making a television series can be a lot like surviving the apocalypse. Most of the time you're thrown together with a group of strangers and forced to overcome differences with the hopes of achieving something larger than yourself — maybe even forming a sort of family along the way.
And you shoot a flamethrower.
That's been Gabriel Luna's experience making The Last of Us, the massive HBO production that over the course of two seasons so far has turned its cast and crew into a community not dissimilar from the ragtag forces defending the walls of Jackson Hole, Wyo., from a horde of infected.
"It was very similar in the way that we kind of embraced each other off-screen and tried to build the fibers between the cast as quickly as we could," Luna told Gold Derby. "There were instances where people had kind of just met each other and were thrown into pretty intense subject matter."
And considering what happens in Season 2, "pretty intense" might be putting it lightly.
Spoilers for The Last of Us ahead!
Five years have passed since the events of Season 1's finale, in which Pedro Pascal's Joel murdered a hospital full of resistance fighters in order to save the life of his surrogate daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). The duo are now living in Jackson, with Joel's brother Tommy, played by Luna.
Tommy has spent the past half decade years growing his family, nuclear and otherwise. He and his wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley), now have a young son, and they're leaders within the community of Jackson, which has grown to resemble something like the world before the Cordyceps.
For Luna, returning to the world of The Last of Us for the second season meant expanding his off-screen family as well, welcoming in new cast members like Isabela Merced, Kaitlyn Dever, and Young Mazino and doing his best to foster the same camaraderie on set that made Season 1 such a special shoot.
"Pedro and myself, Rutina, and Bella were kind of the elder statesman," Luna said. "We were trying to maintain the culture of the show, which is one of love, of real love. And that sounds kind of cliché, but it's, it's really true in this case."
But soon the concerns of production were shifting from whether the costars got along to whether Luna could properly handle a flamethrower. The season's biggest set piece, in which hundreds of infected descend upon Jackson, involves Tommy facing down a massive bloater one-on-one, and Luna got to operate the fire-powered weapon himself on set — with less training than you might expect.
"They give you a three-minute tutorial," Luna said with a laugh. "That's it a couple of days before you go on."
The massive scale of the action in that episode is balanced with drama elsewhere that was painfully personal. Joel's brutal death at the hands of Dever's Abby defines the trajectory of the story that follows, sending Ellie off on a quest for revenge that takes her and Dina (Merced) all the way to Seattle.
But when the action picks back up on Episode 3, the focus is on Tommy, now a grieving brother, as he prepares Joel's body for burial. The scene, for Luna, had greater implications for the show that went beyond the story. "It was kind of a farewell to the great leader," Luna said. "The great leadership that Pedro gave, and a transition into Bella's tenure, and myself and everyone else and Kaitlyn, who were going to continue telling the story. Yeah, I kind of let it all go in that moment."
The scene was such an integral one that Luna had a unique request. Since Joel remains beneath a sheet during the sequence, Pascal's double, Philippe, laid on the slab for filming. And when production asked Luna whether it would help to have the actor opposite him in full, bloody makeup, he took them up on the offer — unfortunately for Philippe.
"I apologized for having them put him in full makeup," Luna said with a laugh. "I'd have to lift that shroud and see his face, and I wanted something to to obviously engage with and react to, and [Philippe] was kind enough to go through several hours of prosthetic makeup to do the full look. And, but it all ended up being really effective for me and hopefully for the piece itself."
And while Ellie's quest for Abby takes the action away from Jackson, Tommy eventually catches up with her, just in time to land at the center of the season's climactic cliffhanger. Held at gunpoint by Abby, the fate of Tommy and Ellie are left in the balance until Season 3. But Luna is excited for viewers to learn more about what his character was up to when the series' point of view shifts to Abby and winds the clock back two days.
"What's special about the game and the perspective shift that occurs is that your heroes in one viewpoint are someone else's boogeyman," Luna said. "And I look forward to being that — if we do, in fact, handle that story that way. It's an opportunity to really show somebody who returns to their base instincts and the most destructive aspects of their nature and someone who gives in to the fury that that kind of grief sparks."
