Filming for the third season of HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation is currently underway, with recent footage showing Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby and newcomer Kyriana Kratter as Lev, and now showrunner Craig Mazin has shared more about what viewers can expect o from it.
Please be aware of The Last of Us spoilers below.
As teased in The Last of Us season two finale, season three will largely focus on Abby’s story. In the game and after playing mostly as Ellie for the first half of The Last of Us Part 2, we move over to controlling Abby. While playing through Abby’s sections, it then transpires that the surgeon Joel killed at the end of first game was her father. Abby therefore killed Joel in Part 2 out of revenge and grief.
It was a startling revelation, as players had spent the game up until this point resenting Abby for killing Joel, but understanding Abby’s side of the story and seeing things through her eyes threw the decisions of Joel and Ellie into a much less sympathetic light.
Similarly, season three of HBO’s The Last of Us TV series will confront viewers with the fact that sometimes characters we have come to trust aren’t always right. “What I love about that story is that you are denied your heroes and you’re denied your villains. What you are forced to reconcile with is that the people that you care about and root for are not good all the time,” Mazin said during a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter (via GameSpot).
“It is a question of perspective and narrative,” he continued. “It’s a very powerful thing to be given a story that gives you a hero and that makes your side good. That is fundamental to most religions – and it is fundamental to most politics now. It creates a tribalism. It’s ‘us versus them’, and it happens very, very quickly.”
“The answer to conflict, tribalism and to the alienation of one group from another [is], you can say, empathy. But going about showing empathy is hard, especially when you’re talking about empathising with somebody who has hurt you personally, taken something from you, caused you grief. There’s a reasonable argument to be made that you should not be extending a hand to somebody who has hurt you or hurt somebody you love,” Mazin said. “And [that’s] easier said than done. So this is about exploring that.”
Maizin said that if anyone can make Abby sympathetic in viewers’ eyes, it’s actor Kailyn Dever. “She is the kind of actor that you find yourself aligning with and rooting for almost instantly,” Mazin said.
In a change from the first two seasons, The Last of Us season three will be led by Mazin without the assistance of Naughty Dog‘s Neil Druckmann as a co-showrunner, director, writer and producer. Last year, Druckmann announced he was stepping back from the series after The Last of Us season two, in order to focus on the studio’s gaming output, which includes Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
HBO’s CEO Casey Bloy has said he is not worried about The Last of Us without Druckmann, stating the game director had “given us a good blueprint with the show”.
