‘The Last of Us’ Star Kaitlyn Dever on Abby’s Rage Toward Joel and the ‘Sneaky’ Detail She Shared With Her Family During Filming
Note: This story contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 1.
In the “The Last of Us” Season 2 premiere, viewers met Abby, a Firefly who is seeking revenge against Joel after his violent rampage at the end of Season 1 to pull Ellie out of a surgery aimed at using her immunity to make a vaccine for the Cordyceps infection.
Despite the pair’s escape, Abby vows she will kill the hardened survivor played by Pedro Pascal “slowly” once they find him.
“We are seeing a very raw and vulnerable side of Abby in this place where she’s just wrapping her head around this thing and truly just trying to cope with this sudden loss, and dealing with the first stages of grief and how it manifests itself within the group of the Fireflies, and how the Fireflies are also having to regroup and figure out what their next steps are and who their leader is,” actress Kaitlyn Dever told TheWrap. “They’re just trying to get back on their feet. So it’s a lot they have to figure out, but the anger and rage is just beginning for her.”
Though video game fans have the opportunity to play as Abby, audiences of the HBO adaptation are introduced to the character earlier on, which gives more insight into who she is and her motivations.
“You are introduced to Abby in the game by playing as Abby. So you are occupying her space. You are connected with her. That’s not how television works. So we do meet her in a different way,” executive producer Craig Mazin said. “We get an opportunity to spend more time with her and to feel a little bit closer to her, to see a little bit more of how she and Ellie are so oddly the same in circumstance, in background, in temperament, in their willfulness, their loyalty, but also how profoundly they feel both love and loss. And that is part of what I think makes the narrative of The Last of Us Part II so remarkable.”
“We do take away the easy handles that we usually have to hang on to a story — good, bad or even protagonist/antagonist. It’s hard to tell sometimes who the hero is,” he continued. “The idea is that this is beyond heroes and villains here. Just as in real life, there’s us and them, unless you’re on the other side, in which case, that’s us and that’s them and that is so much of what this story is about.”
Despite Abby’s on-screen hatred of Joel, Dever said she and Pascal were “instant best friends” after meeting each other.
“He’s such a special person. I have never really worked with anyone like him in my life. I don’t know what it was, we were just like instant best friends,” she said. “I just felt like I could make fun of him, he could make fun of me and he just felt like my big brother. I fell in love with him instantly. It was so refreshing to be around that kind of energy because of how much intensity there is in the material. It was a nice breath of fresh air.”
Dever, who is a longtime fan of the games and was previously considered to play Ellie in the scrapped film version of “The Last of Us,” added it was “so cool” to step into the world of the video game franchise she played with her dad and see the infected up close and personal.
“They’re just amazing. The makeup work is insane,” she said. “It’s one thing to see in the show and it looks so great, but then it’s another thing to experience it in person. And it does feel actually very scary. It feels very real. That whole fence sequence is pretty much shot-for-shot [from the game].”
She also recalled sending her dad a “very sneaky” video during filming.
“I was hoping I didn’t get hacked. He’s such a big fan of the game,” she said. “I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that, but I did send him one just because I had to. I love sharing all of this stuff with my family. It’s just the my favorite part of my job, honestly. He was like, ‘Oh my God. It’s exactly like the game. It’s so cool’.”
When asked about doing her own stunts in Season 2, Dever admitted there wasn’t a lot of time to prep in advance for Abby’s bigger stunt work.
“The fence sequence [in the trailer], for example, was really just figuring it out as I went and being kind of thrown into it, which I think kind of helped me because it got me out of my head and just into the body of the character in those scenes. And it was definitely high stakes, for sure,” she said.
At the end of Episode 1, Abby and her crew have arrived in Jackson, Wyoming, five years later in search of Joel. Beneath the surface, there’s also the threat of infected, where tendrils can be seen growing inside a pipe.
“In the very beginning of Episode 1, we see how, led by Joel, Jackson is trying to refurbish these old, broken down homes to house refugees. This is a noble thing to save more people, but that’s why they start breaking open these pipes in the first place,” Mazin said. “And when you start smashing stuff, maybe there are consequences.”
“You’re going to see how perilous this world is and how much the consequences are going to come to head in all ways,” co-executive producer Halle Gross added. “Jackson is supposed to be this safety, this home. But now it’s threatened in a multitude of ways and how will people be able to fight for the people they love?”
“The Last of Us” air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and streams on Max.
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