Why the creators of The Last of Us changed Pedro Pascal’s Joel from the games

The last of us looks a lot like the video game that inspired it, but don’t confuse that with condemning it with faint praise. The HBO series’ weather-beaten apocalyptic look is often taken straight from a game known for looking cinematic and full-on, even at its most ruthless and brutal. Everything is captured in horrifying detail, including Joel, now played by Pedro Pascal. But in The last of us TV show, Joel isn’t quite the man he was — and that’s on purpose.

Some of this is just practical: as part of translating the game to television, co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann needed to update the way Joel interacted with his surroundings.

“There are certain things we embrace about our medium that are different than the game medium. In the game you need a healing mechanic; You get shot a lot, you have to heal. In reality, you get shot once,” laughs Mazin.

Dispelling that means revealing all the damage a guy like Joel suffered physically and emotionally after Sarah died. His knuckles remain bloody and his body seems to ache. Pascal’s Joel doesn’t sneak around like Joel in the game. “Joel squats so much he would have these massive quads right?” says Mazin. “55-year-olds can’t squat for more than three minutes! Sharpen! And then her back gives way.

“That’s how you embrace frailty […] I think it helps draw people in This Kind of immersion that’s different than video game immersion.”

This also means tweaking Joel’s character – very slightly. With a long, arduous journey ahead of him, television’s Joel has a different path to follow than his character. And viewers who’ve played the game might spot key differences in its TV counterpart: instead of dealing guns like in the game, it’s trying to find a battery for his car so he can find Tommy.

“In the game, the gameplay requires Joel to be extremely able to justify whatever actions you do, and there are certain things we do in the game to make you connect with him by being him” , says Druckmann Polygon. “And that was part of the cast of Pedro Pascal as Joel. […] We were looking less for someone who could play a tough guy – because that’s the easier part in a way – and more someone who could show that there was a tortured soul inside.”

The last of usIn the first episode of Joel, this battle begins between the lighter side of his heart and the massive grief, pain and violence that is now dominating his life. In a way he is softer, a choice that will surely feed into the ending of the first game, which has earned its reputation for being quite divisive. It’s hard to imagine the game’s Joel – who is so often defined by his brutal, thawing apathy – helping a colleague when he’s too overwhelmed to burn a child’s corpse so early in the story.

There, Pascal proved key to Mazin and Druckmann’s vision of who Joel should be in HBO The last of us Conception of a hardened but slightly more human than its in-game counterpart.

“Pedro is so charismatic, and there’s such an appeal — he’s funny, he’s a really funny guy — that when you see him on screen, when you see him on screen, it feels like he’s missing something sees, and you want it to come out,” says Druckmann. “Obviously we see a lot of that in the beginning and his interaction with Sarah. […] And then when that’s all gone and over time you start to see signs of it coming back, it becomes really fascinating to follow this guy, this really damaged guy.”

Pascal recalls that the one note he received read: ‘Remember to bring something [himself] as much as possible.”

“That was the best way for me to understand Joel, with my own heart,” says Pascal. “I found him to be a very persistent person and not someone who thinks about his own feelings even before he loses his daughter or the world ends before his eyes. And that loss calcifies and shapes who he is and how he survives afterward.”

The last of us Premiered on HBO and HBO Max on January 15. New episodes of the nine-episode season air on Sundays.