He may have been the Ghost Rider for Marvel Television and a futuristic “Terminator” cyborg, but Gabriel Luna never played with fire like he has for “The Last of Us.” In the second season of the Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann video game adaptation, his character Tommy finds himself attempting to protect his home of Jackson, Wyoming, from an invasion of an infected horde intent on overtaking a rare safe haven in this alternative timeline. In the series, Luna weilds a real, yes, real flamethrower, to fight off the zombie-like clickers. He gives a tremendous amount of credit to the stunt people he worked with, but also reveals his training was substantially less than you might assume.
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“You just try to take care, be considerate of the people who are doing incredibly demanding, this incredibly demanding stunt work, and then just always try to be consistent,” Luna says of his scenes with the weapon. “It must be the same every time, every single take, the same things must happen on the same timing so everybody knows what’s happening and everyone feels safe and knows they’re safe. I am curious why the training was so short. They drove me out an hour and a half to Squamish to set to train on the thing the day before we shot it, and I literally just walked up and down the street with it for about three or five minutes, and then I was licensed to torch, I guess.”
Still, if a flamethrower is handy, Luna is probably more ready now for any future apocalypse than the average American. Luna’s new skills and that impressive, almost four-week shoot were just a portion of a deep conversation about the franchise’s loyal fanbase, keeping secrets, and how his character changed for the show’s pivotal second season, among other topics.
Please note: There are spoilers regarding a major event in the second season of “The Last of Us” in the context of this Q&A.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: I saw a recent interview where you said it took four weeks to shoot the attack on Jackson, Wyoming sequence. Is that right?
Gabriel Luna: Yeah, no, I think two and a half weeks in principle, and then I did five days on second unit, and then we returned in July for an additional four or five days to reconfigure the end and kind of reshoot, rebuild some of the city and then reshoot a little bit of the very end sequence with the blo. So yeah, all in all about three and a half weeks I’d say.
You’ve done big action stuff before. Did that seem like a lot of shooting for a television series?
Yes. I mean, the scope and scale of that entire sequence was very cinematic, and the attention to detail and the pacing of a scene like that, it did feel like some of the bigger movie-type long action sequences, set pieces that I’ve done in the past. But that’s just a great privilege to be able to take that time, and I’m just really, really thankful to Mark Mylod and Craig and everyone else who just realized that that’s the approach that we need take to get it done, just kind of bit by bit and just not try to scale Everest all in a day.
It’s always nice when you get to breathe. Before you landed the role, I think you were a fan of the game?
Well, no, I wouldn’t say, I mean, I quickly became a fan, but I was aware of the games. I hadn’t played them before I got the role, but it was a really, really kind of fast love affair with that game. As soon as I started to explore what it was all about and engage with it, the story truly works in every medium, and the characters are all so richly and risklessly wrought. So, it was a lot of fun. It was two and a half months of one piece by morsel because it is a very intense story, and especially when you’re kind of immersed in it and there’s these natural stopping points, natural chapter kind of chapter ends, but it’s a visceral game. There are some seriously violent moments that feel merited, that don’t seem to be there for a kind of sensationalized reason. Those are some of the first kind of impressions I have when playing it.
In that context, were you aware of the big event in the second game? The initial reaction from fans and industry alike was, “Oh, there’s no way that will happen that soon. They’re going to try and stretch this out as much as possible.” When you got the scripts and saw that they weren’t, were you surprised?
Oh, no, I don’t think so. Just because that’s the kind of inciting incident for the entire second chapter of the story, and I was really happy and proud of the way we handled the sixth episode, and revisiting these moments in the relationship. Each one of those little vignettes falls on one of Ellie’s birthdays, and in the source material, you see a little bit of that. But it was a clever way of handling that and keeping the spirit of that character and imbuing that spirit within the Ellie [Bella Ramsey] character, and to have her carry that into her revenge trip. But I wasn’t surprised just because, sadly, it had to happen for the sake of the story. But what I was excited about was the way that we kind of redrafted the events of that New Year’s Day and just the fact that we mentioned invasion and how that wasn’t part of the games, and that’s, once again, a sharp left turn that Neil and Craig take to keep everybody on their toes and perhaps to surprise themselves and deepen the well of all these characters and what they’re going through. But also, we eventually kind of end up in the same place, but we take these really elaborate, kind of circuitous routes to get there that test these characters even further before they arrive at these kinds of milestone beads in the story.
Tommy has had a different journey during this apocalyptic period than his brother. Did you need more backstory at all in either season to sort of know what he’s gone through, or had what you saw played in the game, what you saw on the page, tell you everything you needed to know about him?
There’s a lot of discussion in the first season amongst the characters between Joel and Ellie about Tommy and their history. Of course, it’s viewed through Joel’s lens and of his recollection of what that history is and how Tommy responds to the predicament they find themselves in, and then also how he aligns himself with certain people in Joel’s eyes, Tommy is a follower, in a sense, an idealist, and I think that that is kind of mostly through his viewpoint. I think it’s less about him, Tommy following someone else, and more so about Tommy leaving Joel to go and pursue his own life and do these things. And so I think that he casts it in that way, but you’re able to kind of extract the history from those discussions and those memories that Joel has of his brother. And then a lot of it is really already kind of there in Craig’s scripts, but I think I tried to paint a picture of what that 20 years was like and what it was like to watch your brother have this descent and forfeit so much of his kind of humanity and for the sake of survival. And so that’s why when I see him in the first season, I think it’s kind of a beautiful moment when they embrace and they see each other in the street and they embrace. But I think a lot of it, there’s an underlying sense of, “Is this the same person? Is it the same person that I had to get away from?” So, I think I tried to just shape a lot of what those memories were, both good and bad, specifically as it pertains to my brother. That was my only family. But then, yeah, you get to the second season, it’s really kind of shifted in. The family has expanded, and it kind of rewrites the rules for Tommy and how he can behave and the risks he can take, and the responsibilities that he has.