‘Last of Us’ gives fans safe space to experience crisis

NEW YORK, April 11 (UPI) — Pedro Pascal says he thinks his Last of Us television series and the video games that inspired it are popular because they allow fans to share characters’ emotional trials and triumphs with no real risk to themselves.

Season 2 of the post-pandemic, zombie-apocalypse drama premieres on Max Sunday.

It follows Pascal’s hero Joel and fellow survivor Ellie (Bella Ramsey) — a teen who appears to be immune to the disease that wiped out most of the humans around the globe — as they try to make new lives for themselves in a Colorado commune.

Gabriel Luna, Kaitlyn Dever, Catherine O’Hara, Jeffrey Wright and Isabela Merced co-star.

“Storytelling is cathartic in so many ways, always has been. It’s the way that the human beings have made testimony to life, whether it was handprints on the walls inside of a cave to a television show that you can stream on Max starting April 13,” Pascal, 50, said during a recent virtual press conference.

“Growing up, I have always said, all of my development is based on books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, and television that I’ve watched,” he said.

“It’s very much going to reflect the human experience and, under such extreme circumstances, I think that there’s a very kind of healthy and sometimes sick pleasure in that kind of catharsis, in a safe space to see human relationships under crisis and in pain and intelligently draw political allegory, societal allegory and based off of the world that we’re living in.”

Pascal said he was happy to return to the show after the highly anticipated first season was so well-received by critics and fans.

“It’s so special to be back and, also, with such a kind of expanded identity, if that makes sense, because there are new people and there are old people,” he added.

“There’s something that is really exciting about basically giving everyone another season of a show that everyone loved and that everyone has worked so hard on and has put so much into.”

Season 2 picks up five years after the shocking Season 1 finale in which Joel shot dozens of soldiers and medical staff who wanted to kill Ellie in the hopes of finding a cure for the fungus-caused pandemic.

Joel didn’t tell Ellie what really happened, only that the doctors were unsuccessful.

Pascal said the first scene he filmed with Ramsey in Season 2 was in an intimate setting that immediately made clear that “fiercely protective” Joel and his independent-minded, surrogate daughter aren’t as close as they used to be.

“There’s an incredibly painful distance between the two of them in the playing of the scene,” he added.

He joked that his real-life relationship with Ramsey doesn’t reflect any of that tension and he understands she was only pretending not to like him.

“We still got to be on set and [expletive] around and laugh and stuff like that and that was incredibly comforting,” he said. “That was like coming home.”

Pascal admitted the role is a psychologically and emotionally draining one that is hard to leave behind at the end of the day.

“My mindset was grateful to be back and, yet, at the same time, this experience, more than any other I’ve had, is hard for me to separate what the characters are going through and how it makes me feel in a way that isn’t very healthy,” he said. “I kind of feel their pain and, I suppose, I was in an unhealthy mindset.”

Another important relationship to Joel is with his brother Tommy (Luna).

“There was a very, very well-placed arc for us,” Pascal said.

“We started Season 1 together on D-Day,” he added. “There was a kind of bonding initiation process stepping into all of it. We had our rehearsals and, in pre-production, we went river rafting. … In Season 2, it felt like a real natural building of what we had established as characters and as scene partners.”

The show was renewed for a third season on Wednesday.