Why The Last of Us creators changed Pedro Pascal’s Joel from the games

The Last of Us looks a lot like the video game that inspired it, but don’t mistake that for damning it with faint praise. The HBO series’ weathered apocalyptic look is often lifted straight from a game known for looking cinematic and full even at its most ruthless and brutal. All details are captured in excruciating detail. Even Joel as played by Pedro Pascal. However, in Last of Us TV show, Joel isn’t quite the man he was — and that’s by design.

There are practical reasons for some of it: Co-creators Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann needed to make changes to the way Joel interacted and reacted to his surroundings in order to bring the game to TV.

“There are certain things that we embrace about our medium that are different than the game medium. You need to have a healing mechanism in the game. If you are shot many times, it is necessary that you heal. You get shot once in reality,” Mazin laughs.

That means he has to show the extent of Joel’s emotional and physical damage after Sarah died. His body is still hurting and his knuckles are bloody. Pascal’s Joel isn’t sneaking around the same way Joel does in the game. “Joel’s walking in a crouch so much that he would have, like, these massive quads, right?” Mazin says. “55-year-olds can’t crouch for more than like three minutes! Tops! Their back comes out.

“So embracing frailty […]This is what I believe helps people get into my house. This kind of immersion, which is different than the video game immersion.”

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That also means tweaking — ever so slightly — Joel’s character. The TV Joel has a more difficult path than the one he portrays. And viewers who have played the game might spot key differences in his TV counterpart: He’s no longer dealing weapons like he does in the game, but trying to hunt down a battery for his car so he can go find Tommy.

“In the game, due to gameplay, Joel has to be extremely capable to justify all the actions you’re doing, and there’s certain things we’re doing in the game to get you to connect to him by being him,” Druckmann tells Polygon. “And that was part of the casting of Pedro Pascal as Joel. […] We were less looking for someone who could play a tough guy — because in some ways, that’s the easier part — and more someone that could show there’s a tortured soul inside of it.”

Last of Us’ first episode sets up that struggle for Joel, between the lighter sides of his heart and the massive grief, pain, and violence that defines his life now. Joel is in a unique way. It isThe second game will be softer. This choice is sure to influence the end of the first one, which has been criticized for its divisiveness. It’s hard to imagine the game’s Joel — so often defined by his brutal, thawing apathy — help a fellow worker out when they’re too overwhelmed to move a child’s body to the pyre this early in the story.

It’s there that Pascal proved to be key to Mazin and Druckmann’s vision of who Joel needed to be in HBO’s Last of UsThe idea of the hardened, but still a bit more human than his gaming counterpart.

“Pedro is so charismatic, and there’s like a pull — he’s funny, he’s a genuinely funny guy — that to suppress all that when you watch him on screen, it feels like there’s something missing from this guy, and you want it to come out,” Druckmann says. “We obviously see a lot of it in the beginning and his interaction with Sarah. […] And then when all that goes away, and then over time, you get to see hints of it coming back out, it becomes really fascinating to follow this guy, this really damaged guy.”

Pascal remembers the one note he’d get was “to remember to bring [himself] to it as much as possible.”

“That was the way to understand Joel best was, you know, with my own heart,” Pascal says. “I found him to be a very hardened person, and not somebody who reflects on his own feelings, even before losing his daughter or the world ending before his very eyes. And that loss kind of calcifying and shaping who he is, and how he survives thereafter.”

Last of UsPremiered by HBO Max and HBO Max Jan. 15. The nine-episode series airs new episodes on Sundays.