Kaitlyn Dever handled a household tragedy shortly earlier than she filmed Joel’s demise scene for Sunday evening’s episode of “The Last of Us.”
“To be as honest as possible. I will just say that my days leading up to this scene were horrible,” the 28-year-old actress, who performs Abby within the HBO sequence, mentioned in a brand new interview with Leisure Weekly.
“I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene, and my mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day,” Dever recalled. “So I was sort of in a fog. I was in a daze.”
Dever’s mother, Kathy, died in February 2024 after a 14-year battle with breast most cancers.
The Emmy nominee confirmed to EW that her first scene for Season 2 was when Abby brutally murders Joel (Pedro Pascal) as revenge for him killing her father in Season 1.
Sequence co-creator Craig Mazin defined within the interview how they catered to Dever as she was grieving her mother.
“We said, ‘Take your time. Take all the time you need,’” mentioned Mazin, 54. “While I care extraordinarily about the show, it’s a TV show. I’m not going to disrupt someone’s grieving process for their own parent, especially [with] a show that’s partly about the grieving process.”
After the present modified the shoot schedule as a courtesy to Dever, the actress had “minimal” requests that Mazin mentioned have been “were easy to honor” when it got here time to movie the Abby and Joel scene.
“Because of my life circumstances, I wasn’t actually able to do my normal routine as an actor, which was really interesting because I was kind of worried about it,” Dever instructed EW. “Usually if I have a monologue like that, I’m memorizing it three weeks before I do it.”
“I had a different approach, and I think that it really served the character in a lot of ways,” she continued. “I was able to sort of… I don’t know, just really let it go and not think about it too much because the words on the page are so powerful anyway.”
Dever recalled that the forged gathered in between takes to obtain notes as a bunch, as a substitute of individually, from director Mark Mylod, who received an Emmy for helming Logan’s (Brian Cox) demise episode on “Succession.”
“It made us all feel like we were a team and doing this together,” Dever mentioned. “I’ve never experienced that before.”
Dever shared the information of her mother’s demise with a heartbreaking Instagram tribute on Feb. 21, 2024.
“My mama. My life. My everything. I don’t even have the words” she wrote. “Nothing I’ll ever say will amount to the gifts you have given me in my life, the boundless joy you brought, the deep, endless, unconditional love you gave me and our family.”
The “Dopesick” actress continued, “Your love was like sunshine, warmed me when I needed it the most and made me smile when I was ever sad. You were everyone’s favorite. You are my favorite. The sweetest in the world. I will be broken forever without you and I don’t know how I’ll go on.”
“The Last of Us” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
