“The Last of Us” season 2 'packs quite a wallop': Creators set the stage for 'high-calorie, dense episodes' (exclusive)

Certain memories stick with Neil Druckmann, a creator on The Last of Us, from when he was making the second installment of the acclaimed video games. He remembers his showrunning partner Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) popping over to Naughty Dog headquarters in Santa Monica to brainstorm not only season 1, but season 2 of the HBO series — while Druckmann’s team of devs worked diligently to meet their deadlines on 2020's The Last of Us Part II.

“We'd be talking about Game 2, and in fact there's a lot of changes — sometimes small adjustments, sometimes bigger — that we're making in anticipation of adapting Game 2,” he tells Entertainment Weekly. “So even before Game 2 was out, we were deep in conversations about where the characters are going and ultimately what we're trying, thematically, to say with this whole story.”

But in addition to those brainstorms, Druckmann remembers a particularly fraught time in 2020. Not only was his team working through the global COVID-19 pandemic, which forced a delay in the game's release, there were leaks that spoiled massive plot points of the story. Toxic reactions, and even death threats against the creators and actors, followed. The response wasn't so much to the story choices themselves, it was that they were received out of context, prompting the gamer community to make their own assumptions and judgements.

“Some of that stuff was borderline traumatic,” Druckmann admits, reflecting on that response nearly five years later as he and Mazin are about to present the game's story to a new kind of audience. “It happened in the beginning of COVID. So there were a lot of very negative things all happening at once. You can't help but think about it now. It's one of those stories that will forever be stuck with me. But our brand is that we pander to no one. We do what's best for the story and whatever happens, happens. There's a very particular story we wanted to tell and we stuck to our guns.”

Related: Catherine O'Hara teases The Last of Us role with Pedro Pascal's Joel: 'She's got this edge' (exclusive)

That strategy continues to pay off. The Last of Us Part II became a sensation, selling more than four million units over its release weekend alone before going on to win award after award at the Oscars of the gaming industry, the Game Awards. And now, as Mazin and Druckmann prepare for the premiere of the show's seven-episode second season, which begins their Part II adaptation this April, they do so from atop a pedestal of their own making: their team’s work on The Last of Us season 1, starring Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, garnered Game of Thrones-level ratings and Emmy recognition.

“Tens of millions of people liked it week after week after week, and that's a number that's hard to get our minds around,” Mazin says. “We are accountable to them and we think our job is to continue to do what we did, which is to challenge people and to delight them, surprise them, and make them feel and provoke thought within them.”

“We don't react to the fear of the audience, meaning our own fear of how they might react to it,” Druckmann reinforces. “We keep asking, ‘What's the best choice for this story, for these characters?’ And that's the choice we make.”

Related: The Last of Us season 2 teaser confirms April premiere, glimpses key game scenes

Audiences will no doubt have intense reactions to the events of season 2, but it’s difficult for the pair to actually talk about what that story entails. Nearly everything could be considered a spoiler. For context, when Naughty Dog released trailers to promote the Part II video game, the studio edited out characters from certain scenes to preserve the surprises. They’re not quite doing that this time around, but every scene that appears in a teaser for season 2 was surgically carved out. And a lot of it has to do with a new character named Abby.

Season 2 picks up five years after the events of season 1, which chronicled Joel and Ellie's trek across a post-apocalyptic, pandemic-scarred America. They are settled in the Jackson, Wyo., commune run by Joel’s sister-in-law Maria (Rutina Wesley), who now has a child with his brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna) — as seen in EW’s exclusive photos from the series. Ellie is, for once, enjoying a normal life as a teenager. She even has a crush on a girl named Dina (Isabela Merced), who happens to be the ex of her close friend, Jesse (Young Mazino). However, there remains tension between her and Joel, who’s still grappling with the actions he took to save Ellie’s life on that cold Firefly hospital bed in the season 1 finale.

It’s during this time of relative peace when Abby arrives. Again, details on Abby are intentionally left vague, but she’s described by HBO pressers as “a skilled soldier whose black-and-white view of the world is challenged as she seeks vengeance for those she loved.” One big clue came in a previous trailer, which featured a particular close-up of a Firefly pendant dangling from her neck. “There's very little that gets into our show because of an accident,” a coy Druckmann comments on that moment.

Related: The Last of Us season 2 drops first look at Kaitlyn Dever's Abby in intense trailer

The storylines for Ellie and Abby are so intertwined in the games that the casting of Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, No One Will Save You) as the latter now feels poetic. Years prior to the HBO series, as Druckmann recalls, Screen Gems originally hoped to turn The Last of Us into a movie, though it never quite came together. They assembled a troupe of actors for a tableread, and among them was a young Dever, who read for the role of Ellie. “We just remained in touch,” Druckmann says. “I believe Craig had the idea of using Kaitlyn for Abby when we talked about season 2. The reason we cast Kaitlyn is because she’s an incredible actor. You look at her body of work and the way she throws herself at that stuff… We value performance over anything else.”

Abby isn’t alone, either. Among her crew are Owen (Spencer Lord), a gentle soul and Abby’s closest friend; Mel (Ariela Barer), a doctor and Owen’s girlfriend; Nora (Tati Gabrielle), a military medic; and Manny (Danny Ramirez), a loyal soldier — all of whom struggle with their own past sins and traumas. (EW’s exclusive photos come with a first look at these four figures trekking through the snow with Dever’s Abby.)

One of the biggest differences from the game, which fans will no doubt point out, is Abby’s physique. Game Abby, originally voiced and acted through performance-capture by Laura Bailey, is a towering, muscled woman, while Dever’s Abby is closer in appearance to Ramsey’s Ellie. In the spirit of getting ahead of any fan comments, Druckmann has a few thoughts on the subject.

From a story standpoint, there are different priorities for the show, Druckmann notes. While the game saw Abby maneuver like Joel "in the way she can physically manhandle certain things," that element doesn't play as big of a role in this version. "There's not as much violent action moment to moment," he says. "It's more about the drama. I'm not saying there's no action here. It's just, again, different priorities and how you approach it." More importantly, "Kaitlyn has the spirit of the game in her," he continues. "What I always loved about the idea was that you are going to continually be challenged as you were in season 1. When you try to pick a hero, it's tough because we're human beings, we're not heroes. For every heroic act, there's someone who suffers on the other side who may see you reasonably as a villain. When you look at Kaitlyn, there's just something in her eyes where, even no matter what she's experiencing, you connect. It was important that we found somebody that we could connect to the way we connect to Bella."

Related: The Last of Us 'may require season 4,' creators tease

Mazin adds, "I personally think that there is an amazing opportunity here to delve into someone who is perhaps physically more vulnerable than the Abby in the game, but whose spirit is stronger. And then the question is, ‘Where does her formidable nature come from and how does it manifest?’ That's something that will be explored now and later.”

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Season 2 is indeed just the beginning. Mazin and Druckmann previously revealed their plans to adapt the events of Part II across multiple seasons. While HBO has not officially greenlit a third outing just yet, conversations have been had. “I think it's pretty likely that our story will extend past a season 3,” Mazin says. “How far past? I can't say. And that's not to say that there are not other stories that could be told, but this story is the one that Neil and I are telling.”

“We have a plan,” Druckmann adds. “We know what we need to do going forward, but we couldn't tell you right now exactly how many episodes or how many seasons it would take to get there.”

Related: Jeffrey Wright will reprise his The Last of Us game character Isaac for season 2

According to Druckmann, their first exercise in mapping out the show's trajectory entailed splitting the entire narrative arc of Part II into chunks to figure out what stories could be told or expanded upon. Once they pinpointed where to cap season 2 — and in TV’s golden age of the eight-episode season, that now falls on episode 7 — then began the excruciating, detailed work of filling in the specifics.

“Each episode is like a meal. You can have a light dinner or you can go to a 12-course French restaurant,” Mazin says. “We have seven episodes. They are high-calorie, dense episodes. If you consider action and drama and scope to be the things that create an epic nature, each one of these episodes packs quite a wallop. You will not be bored.”

That includes the incorporation of deleted material once considered for the game, some of which was presented for the first time in the remastered edition of Part II. Druckmann teases that particular material is “pretty brutal, but I'm very excited for people to see it.” Catherine O'Hara will also arrive in a role we haven't seen in the games, and she's not the only one. "There is a pretty prominent character that is talked a lot about in the game, similar to what we did with Frank [Murray Bartlett] in season 1, that is in this season," he reveals. "There's a very, very cool casting that I hope we can talk about soon."

Related: The Last of Us season 2 first look reunites Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey

So many questions remain. The trailers released thus far showed Jeffrey Wright reprising the role he played in Part II, that of Isaac, the leader of a large militia group. In the game, he’s a figure players don’t even see until the second half, yet he will appear in season 2 of the TV adaptation. Part II also played with a non-linear timeline and swapped between the two main character POVs of Ellie and Abby. Will the same method be employed on the show?

“A big part of the theme of the second game is about perspective, how someone's hero could be someone else's villain and vice versa. It's weird to talk about a story where its structure could be a spoiler,” Druckmann acknowledges. “I don't even know if it's worth mentioning where we landed because I think that's part of the fun for people familiar with the game to see how we approached that challenge in the show. I will just say that we gave it a lot of thought and tried different things. There are some deviations of where we place things."

At the very least, "We certainly are going to mess around with time the way it was in the source material, but as Neil said, we messed around in ways that we felt were appropriate for the show," Mazin says. "When I say 'messed around,' I mean scientifically determined in a narrative way what we thought would be most impactful."

Regardless of how an audience reacts to those changes, the duo's numerous accolades and ratings wins across both the games and season 1 of the show should tell you something. It seems like they know what they’re doing.

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