“You want to see something cool?”
On July 3, 2019, Neil Druckmann first said those fateful words to Craig Mazin inside the Santa Monica offices of Naughty Dog, the developer behind the blockbuster 2013 video game “The Last of Us.” As the game’s writer and creative director, Druckmann was the lead architect of its astonishing story of grief and trauma amid a zombie apocalypse. Mazin — whose gripping limited series “Chernobyl” had just concluded on HBO — revered the game, and had come to Naughty Dog to persuade Druckmann to adapt it for television with him.
But when Druckmann picked up a PlayStation controller during that first meeting, it wasn’t so he and Mazin could discuss one of the game’s fight sequences involving marauding hordes of “infected.” Nor was it to watch one of the many poignant scenes featuring its two protagonists: Joel, a hard-hearted smuggler, and Ellie, a headstrong teenager immune to the fungal pandemic that’s decimated the planet. Instead, Druckmann, in a display of immediate trust, showed Mazin a scene between Joel and Ellie from the game’s top-secret sequel, “The Last of Us Part II” — nearly a year before it would be available to the public.
As it turned out, Druckmann didn’t need any convincing about doing a show; within a week, they were pitching the first season of “The Last of Us” to HBO. Their easy rapport is apparent even as Mazin and Druckmann sit in one of Naughty Dog’s austere conference rooms — part of what Mazin affectionately calls “this concrete palace” — to discuss the show’s second season ahead of their SXSW panel with the cast (Season 2 premieres April 13). Mazin brags that he got to play “Part II” himself as they wrote Season 1 — “It was awesome” — one of countless examples of the bond they cultivated in those early months.
That bond has bloomed into a creative partnership that has redefined what’s possible for video game adaptations — a genre formerly as synonymous with prestige drama as fast food is with fine dining. On “The Last of Us,” Mazin and Druckmann struck a rare balance between visceral action and nuanced storytelling that enthralled gamers and civilians alike, while Joel and Ellie’s odyssey through a landscape ravaged by a global pathogen hit audiences right where they’d been living for the past three years. After its January 2023 premiere, “The Last of Us” joined “Game of Thrones” and “Squid Game” as one of the few hugely popular series that are also critical and awards season darlings; it averaged nearly 32 million viewers over the first 90 days across all HBO platforms, and garnered 24 Emmy nominations for its first season — including for drama, actor for Pedro Pascal (as Joel) and actress for Bella Ramsey (as Ellie) — and wins for guest actors Nick Offerman and Storm Reid.
HBO / Liane Hentscher
But Mazin and Druckmann knew that making Season 2 would be a far more daunting endeavor. Along with the usual pressures of following an overnight smash, “Part II” upends fundamental things fans loved about the first game. It alienates Joel and Ellie from each other, pushes the story to jaw-dropping extremes and forces players to empathize with — by playing as — the game’s central antagonist, Abby (who will be played by “Dopesick” Emmy nominee Kaitlyn Dever). While “Part II” was lauded as one of the best games ever made when it debuted in June 2020, its provocations also caused a cascade of online fan fury that still percolates. On top of all that, “Part II” is such a colossal experience, taking almost twice as long to complete as “Part I,” that adapting it would necessitate telling the story over multiple seasons.
None of that fazed Mazin; if anything, it made him more eager to get to work.
“One of the notes that I resent the most is ‘We loved this thing — more of it, please!’” he says. “No. You love it because that’s the right amount of it. When you do more, what makes it special starts to dissipate. It becomes comfort food. And if there’s one thing about ‘The Last of Us,’ it is not comfortable.”
Druckmann leans forward, turning a thought around in his head. “I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant,” he says. “But I think you have to have a certain level of success to have the confidence to do what we’re doing, both in the game and in the show. Because on paper, it looks so risky. But this is where I love working with Craig, because he thinks like me. Sometimes, you have a feeling the story has to be this and only this, and you just have to commit.”
Mazin turns to Druckmann. “If there’s one thing that you and I share, we have no problem going all in. Sometimes you just move all your narrative chips into the middle and say, ‘Fuck it, we’re doing it.’”
During the six-month production on Season 2, largely in British Columbia, Mazin regularly checked in with Ramsey to ensure the then-20-year-old was physically OK following a day of intense stunt sequences.
“I feel like if Bella broke her leg in the middle of a day, she wouldn’t tell me until the next day,” Mazin says. “I also know that there’s nothing I could write that she would say, ‘Ooh, I’m scared to do that.’”
When I relay Mazin’s observations to Ramsey (who uses both “she/her” and “they/them” pronouns), they break into a smile. But Mazin’s notion that absolutely nothing would rattle them is, Ramsey says, only “half-accurate.”
“I’m scared of some of the bigger emotional scenes, leaving not satisfied with my performance,” Ramsey says. To cope, “before the really dark scenes, I try to make myself as light and energetic as possible.” For what Ramsey calls “the darkest scene this season,” for example, they listened on a loop to the Buckwheat Boyz classic “Peanut Butter Jelly Time.”
“I was on the floor, my eyes absolutely burning with these menthol tears, and I’m just saying, ‘Peanut Butter Jelllll-y,’” they say. “You’ll probably be able to tell which one that is when you watch it.”
HBO / Liane Hentscher
Even though anyone who’s played “Part II” (or just read its Wikipedia page) knows which scene Ramsey is likely talking about, Mazin and Druckmann feign ignorance when the second season’s massive twist is even obliquely raised. But they clearly understand the tightrope they have to walk while adapting the game for TV: They must satisfy fans in the know while still captivating their larger audience, who are watching with fresh eyes.
“There are things where we don’t have the element of surprise, perhaps, the way the games did,” Mazin says. “A lot of people who played the [first] game understood that Joel’s daughter was going to die very quickly in the first episode. Those people weren’t surprised. They felt it because it’s the journey.”
Even if the showrunners stayed faithful to the second game’s signature twist, they also still introduced some significant changes. Variety can report exclusively that ubiquitous character actor Joe Pantoliano will play Eugene, a “Part II” character who players only hear about in the game when Ellie and her friend Dina (played by Isabela Merced on the show) find his abandoned cannabis den. Similar to Season 1’s beloved Bill and Frank stand-alone episode, Mazin saw the foregrounding of Eugene as another chance to expand the story’s scope beyond the game.
Druckmann loved the idea. “I get excited when I see these opportunities,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t know Eugene that well!’ The story we told [in the game] was somewhat superficial. The way this character comes in really gets to the heart of Joel and Ellie and their relationship.”
Six years and one real-life pandemic later, Mazin still marvels at how willing, even eager, Druckmann has been to deconstruct a story he’s devoted so much of himself to bringing to life.
“You are unique in this way, and I’m deeply grateful for it,” Mazin says to Druckmann, before turning back to me. “He understands the value of invention, reinterpretation, addition, change.” Then, to Druckmann: “You always say you want to do whatever will make the best show.”
Druckmann shrugs. “I enjoy a good brainstorm.”
The men are a textbook study in contrasts. Where Mazin, 53, is voluble, demonstrative and unabashedly neurotic, Druckmann, 46, can be sphinxlike in his measured calm. But they share an abiding confidence in their own storytelling instincts and each other’s — like casting Catherine O’Hara as Joel’s therapist in the Jackson, Wyoming, community where Joel and Ellie have lived for the five years since the events of the Season 1 finale, something Mazin has wanted to do from the start.
“There was a scene, early in Season 1, where Joel met with a therapist in the QZ in Boston,” Pascal says via email. “I found it a beautiful way into the character and the walls that are guarding his traumas and losses.”
The scene was ultimately cut before Pascal got to shoot it. “And he was like, ‘That’s half the reason I’m here!’” Mazin recalls. But the showrunner always intended to return to the idea for Season 2. “Therapy is a fantastic mirror to say not just ‘What are you really thinking?’ but what people are refusing to talk about,” he says.
They also embraced the deep estrangement between Joel and Ellie that opens “Part II” — a divide that Pascal says was “painful” to experience.
“While Bella and I are forever joined, to not have them near me for every part of Season 2 felt like a cruel separation,” he says. “Good for my co-dependent nature, bad for my heart.”
“It felt like Ellie maturing and growing up,” Ramsey says of the split. “Me and Pedro were with each other literally through everything all the time the whole [first] season. This season was much more of an isolated one for Ellie. It was a lonelier experience, but I don’t say that in a negative way.”
It’s only when I bring up the character of Abby that Mazin and Druckmann evince any apprehension about changes they’ve made between the game and the show. The character is much more muscular in “Part II” than Dever is on Season 2. With the violence markedly cut down from the game, the showrunners say the need for Abby to be so imposing wasn’t as critical.
More importantly, Druckmann says, “Kaitlyn Dever wanted to work with us; we wanted to work with her. It’s not worth passing it up to continue a search that might never bear fruit to find someone that matches the physicality.”
No matter who the showrunners cast as Abby, though, they were bound to spark controversy. The character’s stacked physique and brutal story arc placed her at the center of a torrent of online vitriol when hackers leaked hours of footage from “Part II” in April 2020. As Druckmann, his co-writer Halley Gross, the voice actors and the team at Naughty Dog scrambled through COVID isolation to make the game’s June release — and Druckmann continued work on Season 1 — they were inundated with antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia and death threats to themselves and their families.
“I’m still amazed that in the middle of all of it, we would get on a Zoom and we would talk about how to make this television show,” Mazin says. “And here he was just like, ‘OK, I’m compartmentalizing. That world goes away; now we work on the show.’ I wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed.”
I ask Druckmann how he managed through this crisis.
“Not very well at the time,” he says, sounding grim. “I get hyper-fixated on stuff, so when I’m alone and I have time to think — and worse I have time to browse — that’s when it gets the most dangerous. I’m starting to doubt myself. ‘What if I did ruin it? What if I did make a piece of shit?’”
It was a narrative that Mazin would not abide, Druckmann says. “Craig was saying, ‘Who cares what they think? I’m telling you it’s awesome. Listen to me.’”
With Mazin’s enthusiasm and pep talks — as well as the support of his inner circle — Druckmann thickened his skin to the point that he doesn’t think that any commensurate online hatred for Season 2 of “The Last of Us” would upset him. “I love the changes that we’ve made,” he says. “It’s a different version of that story, but its DNA is in there. Maybe more than excited, I’m really curious what their reaction will be.”
HBO / Liane Hentscher
How much longer “The Last of Us” could continue, meanwhile, remains an open question. Mazin and Druckmann always planned to split “Part II” into more than one season; they’re just not sure how many more there will be. “It feels like we’ve got one or two more seasons,” Mazin says. “It’s getting harder to make, because every episode gets big. You don’t want to wait four years for a 17-episode finish, or whatever it is.”
Then there’s the long-whispered possibility of “The Last of Us Part III.”
“I was waiting for this question,” Druckmann says, sighing, when I bring up the prospect of a third game. “I guess the only thing I would say is don’t bet on there being more of ‘Last of Us.’ This could be it.”
No matter the show’s long-term prospects, with a renewal all but guaranteed from HBO, Mazin and Druckmann will soon start their process all over again.
“I’ve been feeling scared lately about like, ‘Oh, yeah, I have to start thinking about Season 3,’” Mazin says. “I remember having this feeling when we were finishing Season 1, where I was like, ‘How the fuck are we going to top this?’ Now, of course, I’m like, ‘How the fuck are we going to top this?’”
From Variety US