The most recent season of HBO’s The Last Of Us took some big swings—at least a few of them straight into (former) protagonist Joel Miller’s kneecaps and skull. But, series showrunner Craig Mazin would like to remind the audiences who get mad at him for just following where his video game source material took him: None of that means he did anything bad to actor Pedro Pascal! Pedro Pascal is alive and well. He’s in, like, everything!
This, per a panel Variety ran this week that saw Mazin sit down with a number of other big-name TV drama creators, including Severance‘s Dan Erickson and Yellowjackets‘ Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. Mazin, who was there with Last Of Us game series writer Neil Druckmann (who’s been similarly vocal of late about some of the show’s big twists), applauded the decision to kill Joel in video game The Last Of Us Part II, and doesn’t seem to be too upset that he was thus forced to be similarly bloodthirsty. “[Druckmann] did a thing. Everyone lost their shit, and then I had to do that same thing, because he did the thing. I loved doing the thing, I thought it was great.” But, Mazin adds, “The big complaint that I’ve gotten is, ‘Why did you kill Pedro Pascal?’ And I keep explaining, we didn’t kill him! He’s a man, he’s alive. He’s fine. And he’s in literally everything else. So I don’t know what the problem is!”
Mazin does have a point: You can’t throw a rock at a major Hollywood property right now without hitting Pascal, who’s about to be firmly entrenched in both the Star Wars and Marvel universes. So losing (one of) his regular TV gigs probably isn’t hurting too much. (Even then, he continued to pop up on The Last Of Us post-mortem, most notably in a big flashback episode later in the season.) There has, honestly, never been a time in human history when Pedro Pascal was more readily available to the people. Craig Mazin needs you to know this. Stop yelling at him!
