Hollywood may be embracing video games like it never has before, but that doesn’t make adapting a smash hit for the small screen any less daunting. Take it from Craig Mazin, “The Last of Us” showrunner and executive producer who told IndieWire he was “mostly anxious” ahead of his award-winning show’s Season 2 return — airing Sunday, April 13 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
“That’s how I wake up,” Mazin said. “It’s how I go to bed. It’s often how I wake up in the middle of the night. Because I feel an obligation to this pretty sizable audience to give them something they love.” A major fan himself, Mazin has a “Last of Us” tattoo on his forearm depicting an iconic weapon from the game.
Flexing his black-and-gray switchblade, Mazin continued, “Look, we’re really happy. We think we’ve made something great. I think the season is pretty amazing, but now it’s time to kind of let the kid out into the world and see how people take it all in. It’s a lot.”
When “The Last of Us: Part II” reached gaming consoles in 2020, the action-adventure sequel ran into several controversies. Written by Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross, the record-breaking juggernaut from Naughty Dog shattered sales records and was named Game of the Year by hundreds of organizations. But everything from a major script leak to homophobic backlash against the story’s queer hero Ellie (played by Bella Ramsey in the TV series) made the title contentious. Still, Mazin knew he had to make this project.
“I’ve been doing this for a while now, and I think I finally got to a place where it seemed I was running out of life quickly enough as I get older that I want to do things that engage my heart deeply,” he said. “That’s what I have time for now, and I also know enough about myself to know, especially now that I’m doing more of the total filmmaking, directing, and editing, and finishing things as a showrunner, if I’m going to do something, I do it so completely, I throw myself into it so deeply, that it better be something that I truly, truly love.”
Thanks to his Emmy-winning “Chernobyl,” Mazin was established as an award-winning HBO auteur long before “The Last of Us.” Asked to compare the challenges he faced making Season 1 and Season 2, Mazin mentioned the historical miniseries and explained how scope impacted his rendering of both a real nuclear disaster and fictional zombie apocalypse.
“The challenge really is the challenge that I kind of always feel — I felt it when we were making ‘Chernobyl’ — which is, ‘Can we make this better? Yes? Let’s make it better. Well, you’re really tired? It doesn’t matter.’ You push yourself, you push yourself, you push yourself.”
IndieWire’s Ben Travers reviewed “The Last of Us” Season 2, awarding it an “A-” and calling it “a thrilling, twisted evolution of HBO’s formidable survival saga.” A multi-directional revenge epic that has haunted gamers for years, it’s a killer story. But if you ask Mazin what makes the “perfect” revenge arc, he’ll tell you he doesn’t know.
“Even the stories that I know are about revenge, for instance, ‘Kill Bill 1’ and ‘2,’ it’s not really about revenge,” Mazin said. “In the end, you can see how it’s not about revenge. It’s about the pain we feel because we were betrayed or the pain we feel because of something that was lost to us or something that we didn’t understand about ourselves or the people that we loved or we thought we loved.”
Ultimately, Mazin said the key to adapting “The Last of Us: Part II” was drilling deep into the characters. The writing process helped Mazin put more trust in his love for the source material and his instincts as an auteur. The writer/director brought up Quentin Tarantino and his iconic martial arts duology starring Uma Thurman as The Bride again to explain his own evolution.
“I love Quentin Tarantino films, and there are times in Tarantino movies where I think, ‘Oh, that is odd. That was a strange thing — and yet fully consistent with everything else,’” he said. “So it was Tarantino-y, even if I go, ‘Oh, I’m not sure I agreed with that one moment you did there, Quentin, it was still you.’”
“If I should stumble and fall, I stumbled and fell as I was loving it,” Mazin said of the decisions he made of “The Last of Us” Season 2. “I didn’t stumble and fall because I didn’t understand it, because I didn’t care because I came at it cynically or because I needed money. I did it because I loved it.”
“The Last of Us” Season 2 premieres Sunday, April 13 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
