Gabriel Luna, who plays Tommy, the younger brother of Pedro Pascal’s Joel, admitted that there was definitely a concern about the weight of the subject material, but he remains confident that the somewhat shared experience between the characters and the audience might be a benefit.
“I think what you might worry about is the potential for a fatigue with our audience in dealing with this subject matter that is very fresh in all of our experience,” Luna said. “I think that is ultimately going to be the truth of people’s experience, is that having this global shared moment in time gives the audience the docking point, gives them the on-ramp to the story, and they know it. They know what it feels like to start to hear murmurs coming from across the globe about this invisible threat.”
Luna recalls what shooting “The Last of Us” right in the height of Covid was like, which was always at the forefront of their minds as they tested and walked onto set everyday:
“It could be, might be a little traumatizing for some of us, I think, but it’ll help. I think it helps in the processing of what we all went through and that it was ever-present in our minds. I mean, we were shooting during 2021 in the middle of it, had to test, had to always be worried about that. We seemed to be dodging it really well for quite a while. Eventually caught up with us, but you couldn’t prepare for that. We’d have to go back a hundred years if this had not happened when it did, and so odd how things seem to be on that hundred years cyclical deal.”