THE LAST OF US Season 2 Showrunner Was 'Terrified' to Film Joel's Brutal Death; 'What Bella Did There Was Pretty Shattering' — GeekTyrant
If you've played The Last of Us Part II , you probably still carry the emotional scar of Joel's brutal death at the hands of Abby. It's one of the most talked-about moments in gaming, and as you know, it made its way into HBO's second season of The Last of Us .
Showrunner Craig Mazin recently spoke about the pressure of bringing that moment to life for the screen—and the emotional gravity it carries. He said:
'I think the one that I was the most eager to create on screen and terrified to create on screen was Joel's death, and specifically, really, when I think about it, it wasn't so much the mechanics of Joel dying—you don't want to recapture what somebody did, but what Ashley Johnson did in the game is heart rending.
'Something like that is so traumatic and binds you to this character in a way that you weren't bound before... you were bound in a different way to that character before—you were bound to Ellie in season one in the first game, as the person that Joel loved after being unable to love for so long.
'Well, here we're bound to Ellie now in a very different way. And what Bella did there was pretty shattering.'
The emotional weight Bella Ramsey brings to Ellie is meant to reshape how we connect to the character on screen. While some game-to-screen adaptations soften their edges, The Last of Us has leaned in on the intensity, knowing that this is a turning point not just for Ellie, but for the entire story moving forward.
In the game, Joel's murder is jarring partly because of how little explanation the player gets. Abby's rage is felt, but not fully understood until later.
On the show, the pacing shifts. The adaptation leans into clarity, with Abby (played by Kaitlyn Dever) revealing her motives as she stands over Joel. She tells him about the 18 soldiers—and the 'unarmed doctor' he killed. That doctor was her father. And with chilling calm, she lets Joel know exactly what's about to happen.
Joel's death lands in Episode 2 of The Last of Us season 2, now streaming on HBO and it's a gut-punch, but it's also the narrative fuel for everything to come.
So, how did you feel seeing that scene play out on screen? Did it hit you the same way as the game—or differently?
Via: GamesRadar+
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They told the actors that they were getting out of helicopters wrong. The rich don't duck down, because they know instinctively where the blades are; they've been traveling this way all their lives. Are you in a world where you do get pitches for that, because companies want to see their products in your work? We've resisted product placement. Tell me about your relationship with the characters. You've spoken about your Succession characters and said that, at the moment you are writing, you have to like them to an extent, or at least suspend judgment of them. Yeah, I think that's true. This is a slightly different tone of a piece. I'd be interested whether you agree, but I think it's more of a dark comedy than Succession was. 13 I do agree. When the action turns from verbal to more deeply threatening I was taken aback, and Armstrong plays with the shifting tone. The way the world is, and tech's relationship to it, seems really troubling to me. 14 However, when we write the history of the world, maybe Elon Musk will have saved it, with what he has done with Tesla. Maybe Starlink is going to do extraordinary things. Overall, Armstrong is measured when talking about Mountainhead, but Bloomberg's own review zeroed in on this angst. 'The anger that spurred Mountainhead 's creation is also its best quality,' Esther Zuckerman writes. 'Armstrong is pissed off and has decided to channel that into brutal jokes. If we can't laugh at these people, what else can we do?' The achievements of these people are significant and real. And I'm not one of those people who thinks Musk just slaps his name on everything and takes the credit. I think he has got extraordinary talents. He seems to have taken a very dark turn in terms of his politics. 15 Musk hasn't just weighed in (verbally and financially) on US politics. He's also been supportive of Germany's far-right AfD party. 'It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,' Musk said in January, speaking during an AfD campaign event alongside the party's co-leader, Alice Weidel. I'm worried about all the parts of tech that everyone else is, especially AI. But I wouldn't want that to diminish a sense that these people — it sounds banal, but they're very important figures and very talented figures. I just think it's interesting what happens to people as they try to marry their egos with their moral impulses, and in this case with an unbelievably large amount of money. Tell me about the format, because I wondered about the choice to do a film versus the development that you had over successive, not only episodes, but seasons of Succession. Was it liberating to focus your energies on a single film, or did you miss the scope to develop this more? No, I feel it is a target that I've tried to hit, and it's a one-use thing. The things that happen in the film are relatively extreme. It'd be difficult — not completely uninteresting, but difficult — to come back, quote, 'next week' from the events. The relationships are thinner, they're not family, which is great for drama. They can break apart. It was liberating, just liberating on a human level, not to have to think about running a show, which is a big endeavor. I think the form fits the subject matter. And directing? And directing… Yes, I wanted to direct something. I think this was a good thing for me to direct because we wanted to make it really quickly. It's on TV six months from when it started being written and I was really keen for it to appear in the same bubble of culture or time as the audience are watching it in. 16 I like collaborating with directors, but it takes some time and it takes some adjustment to come to the same vision. And not having that I think was an advantage. Events are indeed moving fast: Since I spoke with Jesse earlier this week, Elon Musk has announced he's leaving the Trump administration. Mountainhead does retain ambiguity on links to real-world events; Armstrong even shelved an early idea of having the tech bros watch news on ATN, Logan Roy's TV channel in Succession. Did you think the moment might pass? Because I feel like the tech titans moment… This is our age. I think you could have taken your time with it. Yes, I take your point, and I hope that people will be able to watch it in a few years and it'll still feel interesting. And no, they're not going away. It's just a gut feeling. It's a creative feeling. And it may have been total miasma, and it may have been also, partly, a challenge to myself. I was scared of directing. [It was] a reason to run at it rather than read everything, watch everything I could about directing. And worry about it. Yeah. Did you love it, the directing? The control must be great. [Laughs] What you say happens. You don't give your script to someone else. I did like it. The four leads are exceptionally talented, but also really decent and nice people, and very collaborative. So that made it a pretty easy shoot. I surrounded myself with a lot of people I'd worked with on Succession, so it was relatively comfortable. And people like Steve Carell, on set, do they make suggestions? Do they say, 'This line doesn't really work, I'd really like to change this'? They didn't say that particular form of criticism much. There's room to improvise, there's room for people to dodge around bits which they feel are less expressive of the characters that they've come to. I think they trusted me about the characters I've created for them. I was scared that first morning of rehearsal, presenting myself as the director to people like Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy and Cory — who are not as storied as actors yet, but I think they will be, because they're both extraordinary. 17 So yeah, it was a moment of some anxiety: Am I really going to pretend to be the director here? But I did. Cory Michael Smith has been a stage and screen actor and has worked several times with critically acclaimed director Todd Haynes. In Mountainhead, he plays Venis, the 'richest man in the world' character. Ramy Youssef is best known for the comedy-drama Ramy, which he co-created (and in which, fun fact, his mother is played by Hiam Abbass, who was fictional patriarch Logan Roy's long-suffering wife in Succession). Jason Schwartzman has been in a number of Wes Anderson films and played Ringo Starr in the biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. And of Steve Carell's long career I will pick out just this, because it portrayed my industry: I thought his depiction of Mitch Kessler in ' The Morning Show ' was brilliant. But your work has spoken for itself, Jesse. They're there because they've seen what you've done and they trust you. Succession must have been life-changing. Yeah, it was. I think at least three of the actors said yes to the project before there was a script. So yeah, it has changed the sort of things I can pitch and the sort of things people are willing to do. Is it too soon to ask what you'll do next? It's too soon for me to answer. [Laughs] But I'll go back to a screenplay and this fiction that I've been meddling with, and I just hope I won't get any other voices in my head. I can't believe that the idea of a Succession Season 5 is completely out of the question. Not only because it would definitely do well, but also because of the way that you left it. 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That is life imitating art. 19 In a sweeping recounting of the Murdoch legal drama, the New York Times reported in February that Elisabeth Murdoch's representative to the family trust drafted a ' Succession memo' after seeing how poorly Logan Roy's children handled their situation. Rupert Murdoch's ultimate successor is still being decided in a Nevada court. You never know if these stories are true, there's lots of odd briefing that goes on in a big dynastic family like that, so I never put too much credence on what people say. Honestly, I just felt humanly sad if that was the case, in that it's hard to think about your parents' death. So if that's true, I feel sad to the degree it's a human reaction, and surprised it's a corporate reaction. They really had bought [the] Murdoch myth if they hadn't realized that at some point he will pass away. Can we talk about your observations on the changing nature of TV? Since you hit the big time in this world, quite a lot has changed for the streamers in that they're not growing as strongly as they were and YouTube is hoovering up more advertising. 20 Can you imagine making a show for YouTube? Google's video division now accounts for more TV viewing than any other network or streaming service, and YouTube (not including its own live-TV offering that bundles traditional channels) accounted for over 12% of TV viewing in April, more than all of Walt Disney Co.'s TV networks and streaming services combined, according to Nielsen. Last year, YouTube sold almost as much advertising as Disney, Paramount, Fox and NBCUniversal combined. Well I have a deal at HBO, so no. [Laughs] Not right now. Not right now. I don't know, anything's possible in the future. Personally, I grew up with the rhythm of a weekly release. I like the sense of a show growing that you get with that. I guess YouTube could do that too. I do worry – and this might seem ironic or even disingenuous coming from someone who's done such a lot in the US recently – but I do worry about British drama and drama that's particularly about British themes. At the moment it seems like there's space for [that]. Shows like Suspect, 21 the Jeff Pope piece on Jean Charles de Menezes, which was brilliant. And Adolescence, 22 which is also brilliant. But I worry about that, and I love what the BBC does for the British broadcasting environment, and I hope it thrives. A four-part series on Disney+, Suspect tells the story of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by police in London in 2005 after he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist. Adolescence, which follows the aftermath of a 13-year-old being arrested for murdering a schoolmate, has been a global hit for Netflix despite its very British setting. The show explores universal themes having to do with children and social media. 'Why can't we look at phones and social media as [we do cigarettes and alcohol]? Why can't it be a public-health issue?' co-creator Jack Thorne said in an interview with Bloomberg. 'If a government takes a stand, it might have a real impact.' It can't compete, can it, with the budget of Netflix. Not on its own, not on the current license fee, no. 23 Armstrong is referring to the UK's system of funding television through an annual payment by households. Can it do interesting stuff? I'm always very aware of what Armando [Iannucci] did with the small budget he was given on The Thick of It. You don't necessarily need a huge budget to do interesting work. 24 Armando Iannucci's scathing, expletive-ridden, laser-like take on British politics is cult comedy. And his distinct brand of satire has also proven popular in the US; Iannucci went on to create HBO's Veep. The Thick of It, which you worked on. I guess that the world has really changed since then, right? The success of the streamers has inflated prices for everyone. Well, we didn't need any helicopters in this. It was written as a sort of play. It was a pitch to HBO [that] I could do this for almost nothing, and I would, but we could do it with a bit more scope and scale if we can find an amazing place. You have to pay a crew and you have to employ people and they have to be able to live, but you can make smaller-scale pieces. And I want there to be both. I want there to be Wolf Hall and The Thick of It. I'm saying I hope that lots of money continues to go into British drama and sometimes makers might have to be inventive as well. You're right that public service broadcasters can't afford to make tons and tons of those kinds of shows in the way that Netflix, Disney and YouTube can. When you get used to the more comfortable budgets, it's probably very hard to imagine doing something on a shoestring. You've had the Utah mountaintop now. I don't know. I hope I could go and make another season of Peep Show, 25 which had a perfectly decent budget, but unbelievably smaller level of magnitude. That doesn't scare me. Armstrong co-created this British comedy series, which ran for nine seasons from 2003 and was about two young men sharing an apartment. It did indeed happen on a much smaller scale than a mountaintop — the show was filmed in just a few rooms. As a creative person, how do you clear your head? How do you block your time out and really immerse yourself in something? I like going to my office — it's important for me to have a regime of going there, even when I'm in a more fallow period and I might be reading more than writing. I might be staring out of the window even more than writing, but importantly not looking at my phone or the internet, because I don't take it or have it there. So from a purely creative point of view, the most important thing for me is to go out of the house without my phone and without Wi-Fi. Leave your phone at home? 26 There was a note of horror in my voice here, but of course — unless you have the willpower to leave the phone in a drawer or avoid reaching for it — he's right. One study published in Nature in 2023 found that the mere presence of a smartphone, even if you're not interacting with it, affects attention. TLDR: When a smartphone is around, we work more slowly. Yeah. Wow. That's a lesson we can all take away. Do you have a notebook where you save ideas or do you not need to, because it's there in your head when you need it? I do have a running notebook of ideas, but it's only briefly on paper and then gets transcribed digitally quite fast. And will you be going back to one of your old — well not old, but yet unused works next? Yes! I'm quite close to the end of the screenplay and I'm quite well into the prose I'm writing. So yeah, I hope that both of those will come to fruition. We look forward to that. Jesse Armstrong, thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much. It's lovely to chat. Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend. She joined Bloomberg from the BBC, where she presented its leading news program Today on BBC Radio 4 for over a decade. More On Bloomberg Terms of Service Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information Trademarks Privacy Policy Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices Help ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
