Even in the first season, The Last of Us reveled in filling in the gaps of Naughty Dog‘s brutal and brilliant video game source material.
Bill and Frank’s standalone romance proved to be a high watermark and, as showrunner Craig Mazin tells GamesRadar+, those chances to flesh out the world of the series comes from asking fellow showrunner and game director Neil Druckmann a whole bunch of “annoying” questions to interrogate the background behind everything that makes it onto our screens.
“There’s an opportunity to look at the spaces in-between moments in the game and think, well, if I didn’t have to play – and I love playing – what would we be seeing? Where would we go?” Mazin begins.
“I asked him a lot of annoying questions, and the reason for the annoying questions is, in part, to figure out ‘how did people get here?’ A lot of the time, there aren’t answers to it. Then it becomes our job to provide answers to think about it.”
Mazin points to a potent example: Isaac, played in both the game and the HBO series by Jeffrey Wright. While the history of the WLF’s leader (as he is in the games) is largely obscured in The Last of Us Part 2, Mazin is using the second season to dig deeper into the whys and hows of how he arrived at such a prominent position.
“So, when we think about a character like Isaac in the second game, one question I immediately start asking is ‘Why?’ Why Isaac? Where is he from? What did he do before? How did he get here? All of those questions begin to inform an exploration of the kinds of stories we can tell,” Mazin explains.
He adds, “But sometimes it just comes down to simple curiosity, where we think, ‘What if there’s a new character?’ What if there’s this brief mention of somebody that we never meet, but it’s in a letter or a note or something in the game? How do they interconnect? And how would that impact Joel and Ellie’s relationship? And out of these things, we find the new.”
To that end, The Last of Us season 2 will also likely break our hearts once more with another Bill and Frank-style character piece exploration.
“What we do find this season, once again, is an episode where the size of the story is reduced down to just really a story about two people. There is a beauty, especially in a season like this, which is so big and action packed and full of adventure, to quiet everything down, take a pause and just sit with two people for a bit and get into the heart of the matter in that way.”
The Last of Us season 2 launches on Sky and NOW on April 14. It will also premiere on HBO on April 13.
For more, check out the new TV shows headed your way in 2025. Then read our verdict on the HBO series with our The Last of Us season 2 review.
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