Warning: This article contains spoilers from the Last of Us season 2 premiere, “Future Days.”
What it must be like to live inside the mind of the only therapist in a dystopian town… Catherine O’Hara‘s Gail on The Last of Us is booked and busy.
“Imagine what she’s taking in, absorbing all day long in that town,” O’Hara tells Entertainment Weekly. “It’s too much for anyone.” That’s what weed is for. “Boy, you got to survive somehow,” the comedienne cracks.
Sunday’s season 2 premiere introduced O’Hara as a character who doesn’t have any ties to the Last of Us video games, but is rather a figure showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann conjured for the HBO drama. Mazin wanted to bring in a therapist for Pedro Pascal‘s Joel in the first season, but it was one of those things left on the cutting room floor… until the creators picked it back up for season 2.
Viewers learn a lot about Gail in the first episode of this next seven-episode arc. Somewhere during the five-year time jump between seasons 1 and 2, Joel started meeting with her regularly to deal with his trauma. He pays for these sessions with bags of Mary Jane, hence O’Hara’s quip. Gail may have a bit of a drinking problem, or at the very least enjoys sipping dark liquor in the middle of the day during her sessions. But, honestly, with zombie-like monsters roaming the world, let this woman have her vices.
Pedro Pascal’s Joel, Catherine O’Hara’s Gail in ‘The Last of Us’ season 2. Liane Hentscher/HBO
Then comes the revelation that Gail bears anger towards Joel because he killed her husband, Eugene, a character from the games we’ll eventually meet on the series by way of The Matrix and The Sopranos actor Joe Pantoliano. Gail acknowledges Joel had no choice, which leads us to believe Eugene was perhaps bitten by infected. Whatever the circumstances, it adds another layer to an already intense scene of Gail trying to get Joel to reveal what he did to make Ellie (Bella Ramsey) so furious with him. (If you need a refresher, look no further.)
“They scheduled a full day for that scene,” O’Hara recalls of shooting the therapy sequence. “It was intense. It takes a lot of [film] coverage. Craig was just very clear. He really knows what he’s doing and what he wants to have happen. So you go there to someone’s show and you have to give yourself to them. I’m the interloper. So I just put myself in his hands and he guided me, and just gave me gentle but clear notes all day long with a sense of humor. Pedro, of course, was really fun to spend the day with and then very intense by the end where he’s defending his life for some reason. It was kind of scary because you want to do a good job joining someone’s great show like that. I wanted to rise to the occasion.”
Some may consider it a surprise to see the star of such beloved comedies as Schitt’s Creek, Best in Show, the Beetlejuice and Home Alone movies, and newly minted Apple TV+ hit The Studio play such a dramatic part. It was a surprise to O’Hara, as well, when she got a call from Mazin. “It’s always surprising when someone just out of nowhere offers you a lovely gift of a new opportunity,” she remarks. “They very carefully let me see some scripts. It’s all very secretive.”
Pedro Pascal’s Joel Miller on ‘The Last of Us’ season 2. Liane Hentscher/HBO
O’Hara acknowledges she typically doesn’t go for the more intense roles. She points to her time working with the late James Gandolfini. The two actors appeared in the 2004 movie Surviving Christmas, but they later voiced characters in 2009’s Where the Wild Things Are, two years after The Sopranos ended in 2007. “He was telling us on set one day that when that show ended, he really needed it to end because he was living in such a dark place every day in his head,” O’Hara recalls. “It’s not that it overwhelms him. He did his job and he lived his life. I’m not saying he didn’t succeed at it, but it’s really difficult.”
She adopts a similar mentality. “I’ll read scripts sometimes and I’ll think, ‘Thank you, but I don’t want to be there in my head for that long,'” she says.
With The Last of Us, it was the combination of her meeting with Mazin and the knowledge that her son works as a set dresser on season 2 that sold her. They shot the premiere episode’s therapy sequence on a constructed set in Vancouver, with additional photography filmed on the larger location for the Jackson, Wyo. community.
Joe Pantoliano’s Eugene on ‘The Last of Us’ season 2; Eugene in 2020’s ‘The Last of Us Part II’ video game. HBO; Naughty Dog
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O’Hara didn’t fully realize the added layer to Gail — that Joel was the one to take her husband’s life — until she got into the mindset while shooting a flashback later on. Mazin and Druckmann signaled in a Variety interview that there will be a season 2 episode in the same spirit of season 1’s Emmy-winning hour with Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). This one will focus on Pantoliano’s Eugene. Based on footage revealed in the trailers, we see scenes of Eugene walking away from Joel in the middle of the woods and Joel raising his gun towards him.
There’s not much O’Hara can say about that forthcoming episode other than, “I’ve never had to cry so much for so many takes. It was killer.”
Someone get Gail more weed. She’s gonna need it.
