Sweaty, tired, and hungry, I sit on a small bus alongside other journalists from outlets all around the world. Though most of them are representing international movie and TV-focused outlets while I sit as the lone games-focused journalist, we laugh about how boring a production set can be. I had no idea how much downtime there is on a set, or how often I’d watch a group of actors perform a scene and immediately reset to do it again, and again, and again. One of the more veteran writers in our group, who tells me he’s visited dozens of sets before today, says that’s often par for the course. Still, as my first set visit, especially to see HBO and Co. film a scene from Episode 5 of HBO’s The Last of Us season two, I expected to be wowed with glitz, glamor, and star power.
But, as the veteran journalist explained to me on that bus back in the hot and humid July of Vancouver, Canada, last year, sets are boring, especially for journalists sitting in a video camp for nine hours watching the crew do its thing – it’s work, after all. A scene on a set is just a group of people putting forth their best efforts to, hopefully, create something that feels packed with polish when the final creation airs months later. I think about this set visit every Sunday night when watching The Last of Us because I remember how mundane the set of a major television series production is; I’m even more wowed watching each new episode because of those memories.
I watch actors in full Stalker prosthetics, makeup, and costume stir sugar into their coffees while discussing tacos with someone who works behind the scenes whose walkie-talkie crackles with instructions and commands. What I hear through the walkie-talkie might as well have been a foreign language, one I assume everyone on that set understood with perfect clarity. The actor isn’t sure if they’re getting fish tacos or chicken tacos that day, by the way. I later hear them explain why the Yeti brand of coolers is great for keeping things cold and how they scored a nice set of Yeti goods on Facebook Marketplace. It’s here I want to remind you this person was in a full Stalker getup. After I secure my own coffee, wondering if I’ll get to partake in tacos (I don’t), I stroll past a table of Infected actors scrolling on their phones, two of them coincidentally discussing their favorite part of The Last of Us Part II.
These infected, like the Stalker I watched make themselves a cup of coffee, are somewhat different from their video game counterparts, but that’s by design. “They [HBO, PlayStation, and Co.] wanted to tweak the design a little bit and give it more of a film aesthetic,” prosthetic makeup department head Paul Spateri tells me. “A lot of video game stuff is quite sharp and edgy, so we wanted to try and soften it a bit and make them look a bit more related, so not quite monstery, making sure there are elements of humanity you can see.”
With my coffee in hand, I return to a tent filled with those cool director chairs that actually aren’t very comfy and ponder why they’re the set favorite for directors and crew. There are multiple monitors around me and the other journalists here, and we each wear headphones to listen to what’s happening on the monitor. This tent, a piece of the “video village” as it’s colloquially known, is located in an old milk factory that’s been turned into hunting grounds for 11 Stalkers. One of those Stalkers, Kelsey Andries, joins Spateri for our interview. “What you’re looking at really is not the final article,” Spateri says, pointing out Andries’ Stalker antlers. “The way they self-mutilate themselves by tearing at their skin, tearing their lips off, their eyelids peeling off as well – it’s sort of like a super masochistic self-harming involved effect – that’s really a combination of us and VFX.”
If you hadn’t picked up on it in the show yet, tonight’s episode likely made it clear: Stalkers aren’t part of the traditional Infected evolutionary line that leads to Clickers. They are a different evolutionary offspring, Spateri explains. “They are more intelligent, they work like a pack, they can think and outmaneuver; they’re not just blindly following the desire to infect.” Making all of this come through on screen not only requires a lot of post-production effort, but the actors themselves in the moment have to do a lot. Andries explains how all the makeup and costuming, including the 3D-printed antlers, takes four to five hours in the makeup chair, “and that’s before we even start shooting.” Then, because Stalkers are on all fours, they work their full body muscles during each scene they shoot.
“Stalkers are tough because they’re quadruped so we’re on all fours a lot and you’re just crawling around, which is incredibly difficult, immensely, and you’re having to do your movements in that form,” she says, adding that she performs as a Clicker in the series as well. “Clickers have so much more fungal growth; their whole face is covered and they have these eye pieces we put in, and once those are in, you’re blind.”
Those eyepieces are installed for close-ups, but in action set pieces, they are removed so the actors can perform. Spateri adds that this is where the symbiotic relationship between set and VFX comes into play – it’s VFX’s job to make the action scenes featuring Clickers look just as good as those prosthetic-heavy close-ups.
Before Andries departs to head back to shoot a scene, she explains how she approaches playing a Stalker. In short, “with humanity.” She says she 100% believes a human is still in there. “That’s the thing that [writer and showrunner Craig Mazin] is hammering into us: we’re not monsters; there’s an element of humanity still inside. Everyone’s trapped. You’re fighting this thing that’s taking over you. They are victims and monsters […] and that’s what makes the performance interesting.”
As we just watched in Episode 5, Isabela Merced’s Dina finds herself trapped by Stalkers (including Andries) in a cage. She’s desperate to kill them and escape death. I hear the pops of set guns a second or two before I see them on screen, and they’re piercingly loud, even with headphones on. Merced, who is my favorite aspect of the season, puts on an excellent performance from what I can tell. But for a reason I’m not privy to, Merced will perform this scene a dozen (maybe even more) times during my set visit. Across my nine hours in that abandoned milk factory, it’s the only scene I watch filmed.
It loses its luster a bit, and my respect for the actors and video crew grows immensely during this day. They’re patient, dedicated, and determined to get every little detail right, and ultimately, it creates something special to watch on screen at home. This gap, the mundanity and work-focused grit of a production set, and the slickly produced and edited episode that is the final cut of all that work, remains fascinating to me. I hope to visit other production sets to see more of this contrast in person.
MIND THE GAP
I asked stunt coordinator Marny Eng, and later Mazin, about this contrast to see how they felt about it. Eng explains it’s part of the challenge with what they do. They’re working to create a final vision that won’t be seen for months. As a result, they have to lay it all on the line and hope it turns out well. “The biggest complication is always staying true to the story, making sure we’re telling the story in the best way the creatives are hoping for,” Eng says, noting they have to put aside their own opinions to help someone else – in this instance, HBO and PlayStation – achieve their vision. “We’re facilitators; we try to bring that vision to life by the performances we create.”
Eng was a stunt performer last season, and now oversees an entire team of performers, including the near-dozen Stalker actors that were on set this particular day. She says the biggest difference between her part in season one and her role in season two is the scale. As the first five episodes of The Last of Us season two have demonstrated, the Infected count is way up from season one. There are 11 Stalkers in this episode, and each Stalker gets two makeup artists. For just the Stalkers alone, that’s 33 people involved, not to mention Eng and her team ensuring stunt performances align with what the production needs.
Those dozens of people are a tangible view of how much work goes into a scene like the one I watched on set that day. Eng explains there’s a lot of work that happens leading up to this day, too, between stunt concepting, rehearsing, and more. “Over time, getting this sequence together, we’ve been thinking about it forever – probably two months,” Eng says. That gap I mentioned earlier continues to widen: months of work lead up to a 9-hour day of shooting basically one scene over and over again. Then months and months later, I watch an episode featuring this scene and it’s all the best parts of that long day spliced together into a tense and well-made setpiece. In these moments, I’m reminded of the game development process. Hundreds of people poured thousands of hours into, say, The Last of Us Part II’s development, and the final product is a 25-hour experience I beat in a week. Dozens of people pour hundreds of hours into an episode of The Last of Us and I consume it in an hour on my couch on a late Sunday night.
Eng closes out our interview discussing her work with Ellie actor Bella Ramsey and Abby actor Kaitlyn Dever. Editor’s note: I’m kicking myself in retrospect for not asking about Merced’s work performing stunts, especially after viewing the most recent episodes of The Last of Us. Eng says Ramsey is an extraordinary human with a phenomenal ability to “pick things up; they’re a real stunt performer in my mind, and if I could work with someone like Bella for the rest of my life, I’d be in heaven.” I ask Eng about contrasting Ramsey’s performance as Ellie with Dever’s performance as Abby in terms of stunt work, considering how differently postured these two characters are in The Last of Us Part II. “[Dever’s] very talented, very physical, and she cares a lot,” she explains. “She’s quite extraordinary herself and very good with this strong and calculated and driven character.
“[Ellie and Abby] are very similar but very different. In another world, they might be the best of friends in a weird kind of way because they’re so good at what they do, independently, but they’re on opposite sides.”
Unfortunately, I don’t get to see Dever or Ramsey perform, though I did pass by Ramsey leaving the set. They were dressed as Ellie, with the butterfly tattoo on their arm, and speaking outside of character – in other words, it’s quite funny to hear Ellie with a British accent.
HBO’S THE LAST OF OUR SET VISIT
I’m about four coffees, three 8 oz sugar-free Red Bulls, uncountable sandwich halves, and seven hours into the set visit when a familiar voice echoes in the warehouse nearby. When all you’re doing is sitting in a chair all day, getting a drink and something to eat becomes a great way to give your butt a break. Moments later, a jovial bearded Mazin steps into our media tent. I’ve heard him in interviews before, but I can’t stress enough how funny it is that Mazin, who speaks with passion and love using a voice that I imagine puts any actor at ease, is behind a show like The Last of Us. He’s clearly tired and, likely aware of how visible his fatigue is, immediately addresses it: “This is Day 150, I think, of shooting. It’s going great, but I am whatever is three levels past exhaustion right now; I don’t even notice it anymore.” He calls his work on The Last of Us a labor of love.
Echoing my conversation with Eng earlier in the day, Mazin speaks to the contrast between shooting season one and season two. He says season two is more difficult because “with the first season, you don’t know what you don’t know. You find out later and you do your best to learn on the job how to do certain things. The scene we’re doing today, we would have approached very differently in season one. It would not have been as efficient, and we would have spent a lot more money on visual effects.” He touches on something Spateri mentioned earlier, noting that VFX plays a big role in bringing to life everything shot on set, though Mazin says the team is trying to do as much practical as they can.
“We try as best we can to do a lot of things practically, so in-camera, and what that means is we build very large sets,” Mazin says. “We built one pretty large set for season one. We have built multiple large sets for season two.” He adds that, to his delight, it’s much harder to see where the on-set work ends and the post-production VFX work begins, and that includes sets.
With so many large sets compared to season one, and a shooting schedule that stretches beyond 150 days, Mazin stresses just how much more work season two is compared to the first. One of the bigger changes is multiple filming units. In other words, the same day I watched Merced perform in an abandoned milk factory, another unit might have been shooting a different scene elsewhere. Managing all of that is a challenge, Mazin says, but one that’s worth it.
When asked about that word – “worth” – and what it means on a set like this, where an entire day is spent shooting a scene that lasts just minutes in one episode of a seven-episode season two, Mazin says it’s about the feelings he hopes the show elicits out of viewers when it’s over. “When they’ve watched it all, and hopefully they do, and they stay with us for the whole ride, which is incredibly gratifying, I want them to arrive at the conclusion that this was awesome and say, ‘that made me cry, that made me laugh, all these things, I love this show.’
“There’s no individual part where I think, ‘That’s what I want them to love,’” Mazin continues. “I want them to love the experience of the whole thing, and that’s asking a lot because their connection with the story we tell is going to be tested. They’re going to fall in love, get angry, there’s mystery, they’re going to be confused, they’re going to be surprised, and they’re going to be scared, and they’re also going to feel some difficult things. But all that is why we do what we do: it’s to give people a chance to feel difficult things in a safe way.”
Much like The Last of Us Part II, the HBO series is not all it seems. In the game, it seems like Abby kills Joel out of cold blood, but there’s more happening within the person holding that golf club. I keep returning to this, the idea that the HBO series is not all that it seems. What I see on screen is a slickly produced, tightly edited, well-shot, and well-acted hour of television. Thanks to this set visit, I know creating this hour of television was so much more work than its ease of watchability. It’s the work of dozens of people whose job that day was to sit in a makeup chair for hours in an abandoned milk factory in Vancouver, Canada; people who perform a scream behind a cage attacked by a group of Stalkers over and over again, maintaining that fear cut after cut; people who keep cast and crew well-fed and comfortable during long shooting days; people who pour over hundreds of hours of footage to splice together a coherent episode; people who spend hundreds of hours finely detailing the VFX that brings to life Infected and more. Do you see what I’m getting at?
For all the Hollywood of a highly acclaimed HBO series, it is still a job for the hundreds of people involved. It wouldn’t be possible without the work of every single person on the set that day, in the editing bays, and elsewhere. I already knew this about game development – it’s not any one single person’s work that makes the game sing, but rather the work of a team. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I learned this lesson applies to creating a television show like The Last of Us as well. That’s the aspect of this set visit I’ll never forget.
HBO’s The Last of Us airs on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
