Pedro Pascal hasn’t really come to terms with the death of his The Last of Us character Joel Miller — even though the episode was filmed one year ago.
“I’m in active denial,” Pascal, 50, admitted to Entertainment Weekly in an interview published on Sunday, April 20. “I realize this more and more as I get older, I find myself slipping into denial that anything is over.”
He continued, “I know that I’m forever bonded to so many members of the experience and just have to see them under different circumstances but never will under the circumstances of playing Joel on The Last of Us.”
Pascal noted that he doesn’t “spend a lot of time thinking about” the show in order to protect his emotional wellbeing.
Related: Fans React to That Shocking 'Last of Us' Season 2 Death
So how has the actor — who played the role since the show’s 2023 inception — kept his emotions buried?
“I was always sidestepping how I really felt, that in a big way my experience was coming to an end on the show,” he told EW. “I guess that was the strangest thing to step through because I felt so bonded to everyone in the show after going through the gauntlet of season 1 together, not just with Bella, but with the entire cast and crew.”
The actor said it was a “very sad” goodbye.
“I had such a physical manifestation, a violent mirror of how sad it was for Joel to die,” Pascal continued. “To be honest, it was quite dreamlike.”
The show’s landmark episode, titled “Through the Valley,” premiered on Sunday and showed Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) getting her violent revenge on Joel. After shooting him in the leg and beating him senseless with a golf club, Abby ended Joel’s life by stabbing him in the neck. Bella Ramsey’s character, Ellie, looked on as her surrogate father’s life came to an end.
When Pascal signed on to play Joel, he always knew the character’s fate.
“It was just a matter of how and when,” he told EW.
Related: What Happens to Joel in ‘The Last of Us’ Game? His Fate Impacts Season 2
Both Pascal and Ramsey agreed that the most devastating part of the episode wasn’t Joel’s death — it was his final action.
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Ramsey as Ellie is begging Joel to “get up” in his final moments. Joel, nearly at the end of his life, attempts to lift his hand toward her voice before Abby does the deed.
“I have no idea if it’s captured on camera, but [there’s] a subtle sense that Joel can hear her in the last breath of life that he has left in him,” Pascal noted. “He can hear her calling for him and hear that she’s in danger and wants to help her and is unable to lift even a finger to do so. I remember playing that, and that was really devastating.”
New episodes of The Last of Us premiere on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
