Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey responds to Joel’s death to ‘The Last of Us’

Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for season 2, episode 2 of HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’, which now streams at Max.

Pedro Pascal expresses the episode 2 of season 2 “The Last of Us”, in which his beloved Joel is killed after being beaten by the vengeful Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). The shocking turn comes directly from the video game “The Last of Us Part II”, which means that Pascal knew when he signed up to play Joel in the HBO series that his time in the show would not last forever.

“It’s not the way they said,” Hey, we kill you at the start of season 2, “Pascal said Entertainment weekly About death. “But it was always a concept that it would remain faithful to the source material in a specific way and that, say, would be a practical and exclusive obligation for season 1. It was just a matter of how and when.”

During the official “Last of Us” spoken with HBO after the show, Pascal added: “I have nothing but respect for the investment level that people have in a video game or a TV program or film or book. I experience that myself. I hurled books in the room because the impact is so deeply on me and the story experiences.

In the series, Dever’s Abby Joel holds hostage and reveals that she is the daughter of the doctor he shot in the head in the final of season 1 to save Ellie. She then shoots Joel in the leg and bumps him with a golf club. After switching to her fists and beaten him up, Abby delivers the fatal blow through a peak to Joel’s Nek. Pascal told HBO that “Meeting Kaitlyn was great” and “It is ironic that something so violent and tragic between characters can immediately bind you to the actor.”

Regarding the set on the set with all his bloody makeup, the actor said: “It was interesting to board the room and see the reactions in people’s faces. It was not an aversion but of heartache.”

“I am in active denial,” Pascal Added to EW About the fate of Joel. “I realize this more and more as I get older, I notice that I am sliding into denial that everything is over. I know that I am forever bound to so many members of the experience and they just have to see under different circumstances, but will never under the circumstances to play Joel on ‘The Last of Us’. And no, I do not spend it thinking, because it makes me sad.”

“The Last of Us” has mainly been a two -handed between Pascal’s Joel and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie during the run. That now all changes into the aftermath of the death of Joel. Ramsey said HBO: “I knew that Joel would die, but it read in the script that I was afraid of getting that little bit … And I was crying. I was actually sobbing my little heart. It is the first time I cried from reading a piece.”

In an interview with VarietySeries co-maker Craig Mazin explained why the creative team of the HBO show decided that season 2 episode 2 was the right time to bring the “damn terrible” moment of Joel’s death to life on the screen.

“There is a danger to torment people. It’s not what we want to do,” Mazzin explained. “If people know that it is coming, they will start to feel tormented. And people who don’t know it is coming, will find out that it will come, because people will talk about the fact that it has not yet appeared. Our instinct was to ensure that when we did it, it was of course in the story and not a single meta function of us wanted to make those people.”

Read Variety Fully interview with ‘The Last of Us’ makers here.