The Last Of Us Season 2 Premiere Scene That Took A Whole Day To Shoot

Don’t attend your weekly session if you haven’t watched “Future Days,” the season 2 premiere of “The Last of Us.” Spoilers lie ahead!

In the second season of “The Last of Us” — HBO’s adaptation of Naughty Dog’s beloved video game series — showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are introducing some characters who don’t appear in the game, including Gail, a therapist living in the protected fortress of Jackson, Wyoming who’s played by Emmy winner Catherine O’Hara. Gail isn’t in the games (though her husband Eugene is mentioned in passing, and based on the fact that he’s set to be played by Joe Pantoliano, we’ll probably see him at some point), so what’s her purpose in the series?

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In the season 2 premiere, “Future Days,” we see the typically taciturn Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) go to Gail’s house, only to learn something very surprising: Joel is seeking treatment from Gail as he works through some mental health issues. According to O’Hara, Mazin and Druckmann gave her and Pascal room as performers … and scheduled an entire day for Joel’s therapy session. As O’Hara told Entertainment Weekly:

“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.”

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Anyone who’s even passingly familiar with Catherine O’Hara’s work knows that, to put it lightly, she’s not known for dramatic roles! This is not a knock on O’Hara, a preternaturally talented actress who got her start on “Second City Television” and rose to prominence in classic Christopher Guest comedies like “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show.” What I’m saying is that a toned down, angry, and largely unfunny character like Gail (though, naturally, O’Hara seizes her few funny moments perfectly) is a new venture for the actress, whose last big television role was the beautifully absurd Moira Rose in the surprise Emmy darling “Schitt’s Creek.” 

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So how did she approach the character of Gail? With her usual humor, unsurprisingly. “Imagine what she’s taking in, absorbing all day long in that town,” O’Hara said in her Entertainment Weekly interview. “It’s too much for anyone.” That explains the fact that Joel pays her for the session with (apparently low-quality) weed. “Boy, you got to survive somehow,” O’Hara quipped.

As O’Hara put it, she was pleasantly surprised when Craig Mazin got in touch with her and asked her to play this new character. “It’s always surprising when someone just out of nowhere offers you a lovely gift of a new opportunity,” she mused. “They very carefully let me see some scripts. It’s all very secretive.”

Gail’s scene in “Future Days” is pretty significant in that it exposes the fact that Joel, years after the events of the season 1 finale, is still haunted by his decision to kill a group of rebel Fireflies — and possibly prevent a cure for the cordyceps virus ravaging the world — to save his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Though he obviously hasn’t been totally upfront with Gail in that she indicates that she doesn’t know why there’s such a significant wedge between him and Ellie, Joel is working through some serious stuff, and the typically private man is turning to a therapist for help.

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We also learn that there’s a wedge between Gail and Joel, and for good reason. Gail may not be in the game, but I already mentioned that her canonical husband Eugene is seen in photos in the game and is discussed by other characters … and in her scene with Joel, we learn that Eugene is dead. Gail, who’s drinking whiskey early in the day and during her session with Joel, remarks that it’s her birthday — notably, her first birthday without her husband of over four decades. Gail also reveals something stunning: Joel killed Eugene. Why and how this happened hasn’t been revealed yet, but hopefully, we’ll learn more about Eugene’s death at Joel’s hands as season 2 continues.

“The Last of Us” drops new episodes on Sundays at 9 P.M. EST on HBO and Max.

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