The Last of Us star Kaitlyn Dever was grieving her own personal loss when filming the show’s Sunday night shocker.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the cast and crew of the HBO hit broke down the making of season two’s emotional second episode, “Through the Valley,” which left viewers in disarray and hard-turned the show’s incoming arc.
(Warning: Spoilers Ahead)
Adapted from the video game franchise of the same name, The Last of Us season two has so far largely followed Dever’s character, Abby, as she embarks on a quest for vengeance to find her father’s killer, Joel (Pedro Pascal).
“The Last of Us” ended on a jarring note Sunday following the death of Pedro Pascal’s character, Joel. / Liane Hentscher/HBO
During Sunday night’s episode, Abby’s hunt came to a harrowing halt when she successfully lured Joel into a trap and brutally murdered him in front of his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey), effectively killing one-half of the show’s heart and forever changing the other.
“It was just a massive scene emotionally, and with blocking, too,” Dever told Entertainment Weekly of the shocking scene, which gamers had been dreading to see onscreen since The Last of Us Part II video game dropped in 2020. “There were so many moving parts and so many things to navigate.”
The actress said that filming the scene was difficult because she had lost her mother only “weeks before” the production. Dever’s mother, Kathy, died in February 2024 after a 14-year battle with metastatic breast cancer.
The cast of “The Last of Us” season two. (L-R) Bella Ramsey as Ellie, Pedro Pascal as Joel, and Kaitlyn Dever as Abby. / Mat Hayward/WireImage
“To be as honest as possible, I will just say that my days leading up to this scene were horrible,” Dever shared.
“I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene, and my mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day,” she added. “So I was sort of in a fog.”
Dever also reflected on the “life circumstances” that impacted her acting as she geared up to play a character dealing with grief while navigating her own.
“I wasn’t actually able to do my normal routine as an actor, which was really interesting because I was kind of worried about it,” Dever said. “Usually, if I have a monologue like that, I’m memorizing it three weeks before I do it.”
But this time, Dever explained, “I had a different approach, and I think that it really served the character in a lot of ways. I was able to … let it go and not think about it too much because the words on the page are so powerful.”
Dever announced her mother’s passing in a 2024 Instagram post. / Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
Showrunner Craig Mazin recalled telling Dever to take “all the time” she needed, telling Entertainment Weekly: “While I care extraordinarily about the show, it’s a TV show. I’m not going to disrupt someone’s grieving process for their own parent, especially [with] a show that’s partly about the grieving process.”
Dever mourned the loss of her mother in a February 2024 Instagram post in which she shared a handful of photos of the two over the years.
“My mama. My life. My everything,” she wrote. “I don’t even have the words. Nothing I’ll ever say will amount to the gifts you have given me in my life, the boundless joy you brought, the deep, endless, unconditional love you gave me and our family.”
