See Pedro Pascal In First Look At The Last Of Us Series
The trailer for Pedro Pascal's The Last of Us series arrives, showing his hero Joel in the post-apocalyptic United States.
This article is more than 2 years old
The only Pedro Pascal related project more highly anticipated than future seasons of The Mandalorian is the upcoming HBO Max adaptation of Naughty Dog’s 2013 action-adventure game The Last of Us. Now the first trailer is here with Pascal as the weathered Joel, Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) as his charge Ellie, and other stars in roles pulled from the game as well as brand new parts. You can see them all–as well as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of one of the Infected–in the trailer above.
Including shots that should be familiar to anyone who’s played the 2013 game, The Last of Us trailer gives us exactly the kind of barren and stricken world we find in the source material. The events unfold twenty years after the release of the Cordyceps fungus turns its victims into aggressive monsters. Pedro Pascal will play the hero Joel, a smuggler, who is tasked with bringing Ellie–who is somehow immune to the Cordyceps–to the Fireflies, a group working outside quarantined zones.
Along with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, the trailer gives us a chance to see Nick Offerman (Parks & Recreation) as the smuggler Bill, Merle Dandridge (Station 19) as the Fireflies leader Marlene, Storm Reid (The Suicide Squad) as the Boston orphan Riley, Anna Torv (Mindhunter) as Joel’s smuggling partner Tess, Gabriel Luna (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) as Joel’s idealistic brother Tommy, and Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures) as the new character Kathleen. The trailer unfolds to the haunting tune of “Alone and Forsaken” by Hank Williams & the Drifting Cowboys.
In spite of the obvious comparisons to The Walking Dead, the experience of the video game and the bleakness conveyed in the trailer makes the upcoming series feel more like less sci-fi centered fare such as 2006’s Children of Men and 2009’s The Road. Regardless, potential future fans not familiar with the story but curious about the show should not confuse the upcoming Pedro Pascal series as a super happy funtime rainbow laugh riot. The world we’re met with in The Last of Us is likely to feel disturbingly familiar to our own.
Of course, those similarities are by design and the show is pushing even further than the game in that regard. In the game, the outbreak begins in 2013, with most of the action of taking place twenty years later in 2033. However, the series has dialed back the time of the outbreak to 2003 in order to place most of the story in the same year that it’s expected to premiere–in 2023.
The trailer for The Last of Us isn’t the first one starring Pedro Pascal to premiere in September; in fact it isn’t even the only September 2022 trailer in which Pascal plays a character with a “youngling” in his care, with shots from episodes set to debut in 2023. Earlier this month the D23 Expo brought with with it the first teaser for Season 3 of The Mandalorian. Along with Pascal and his “young” (relatively speaking) charge Grogu, the trailer shows Katee Sackhoff returning to the role of Bo-Katan, Carl Weathers once more playing Greef Karga, and Amy Sedaris as Tattooine mechanic Peli Motto.
