R.I.P. Joel Miller.
Pedro Pascal’s character was murdered by Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby on Sunday night’s episode of “The Last Of Us”— and now Pascal is speaking out about the shocking moment.
“I’m in active denial,” the 50-year-old actor told Entertainment Weekly. “I realize this more and more as I get older, I find myself slipping into denial that anything is over. I know that I’m forever bonded to so many members of the experience and just have to see them under different circumstances, but never will under the circumstances of playing Joel on ‘The Last of Us.’”
“And, no, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it because it makes me sad,” he added.
Abby beat Joel to death as revenge for him previously killing her father during his efforts to protect Ellie. Bella Ramsey’s character had to watch her father figure die in front of her during the heartbreaking scene.
Pascal told EW that he knew of Joel’s fate when he signed onto the series, which is based on the video game of the same name.
“It’s not like they said, ‘Hey, we kill you at the beginning of season 2,’ but it was always an understanding that it would stay true to the source material in a specific way and that the, let’s say, practical and exclusive obligation would be for season 1,” he explained. “It was just a matter of how and when.”
Pascal also recalled the cast and crew’s reaction to him being in his final “bloody pulp” look for the scene where Joel’s murdered.
“I’ve never experienced anything like I did that day where I stepped onto set in full makeup and then killed the vibe completely as soon as anyone set their eyes on me,” he said. “This kind of shock and heartbreak… it was weird to be on the receiving end of that. It’s like the extreme version of, ‘Is there something on my face?’ I really could see this sort of grief take over everyone’s look in their eyes.”
Series co-creator Craig Mazin told Variety why they decided to kill Joel off so early in the season.
“There’s a danger of tormenting people. It’s not what we want to do,” Mazin explained. “If people know it’s coming, they will start to feel tormented. And people who don’t know it’s coming are going to find out it’s coming, because people are going to talk about the fact that it hasn’t shown up yet.”
He added: “Our instinct was to make sure that when we did it, that it felt natural in the story and was not some meta-function of us wanting to upset people.”
Mazin shared the same sentiment speaking to Deadline about the episode. “It does hurt tremendously when it happens. It hurts, of course it does, because we love Joel, and more importantly, because Ellie loves Joel, and we’re experiencing her heartbreak, and we’re all going to grieve the loss of this person that we’ve come to love,” he said.
In an exclusive interview with The Post, Mazin said that despite Joel’s death, he and Ellie “spend quite a bit of time together in this season…more than people might think.” Joel is expected to appear in flashback scenes as Season 2 continues.
Ramsey, 21, told EW that becoming the lead star of the show “definitely felt heavier.”
“I’ve felt the weight of the responsibility of it more, and not the responsibility of being the main character as much,” Ramsey said. “It is more just the workload and being there literally every day. I did feel at times I was carrying the whole thing on my back, which obviously isn’t true. So many people are contributing. Within how dark the story gets this season, it definitely felt heavy, but I was supported the whole time.”
“The Last Of Us” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
