As The Last of Us approaches its season finale, the latest episode “Kin”, takes us to Jackson, Wyoming, and sees an overdue brotherly reunion between Gabriel Luna’s (Terminator:Dark Fate) character Tommy and Pedro Pascal’s (The Mandalorian) character  Joel. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gabriel Luna talks about connecting with and creating Tommy’s backstory.

The first episode of The Last of Us introduces Tommy Miller as a carefree man who gets into bar fights and comes looking for breakfast at Joel’s place. A caring and compassionate man, Tommy survived the early years of the outbreak with Joel. However, the two separated as Tommy wanted to live a more meaningful life than one that was based solely on survival, leading him to join the Fireflies, a militia group in the series, and later seek redemption and rehabilitation through the community of Jackson.

In the interview with Entertainment Weekly,  Luna talks about what the character of Tommy had to go through once he arrived in Boston. He said that Tommy had to ” find somewhere to apply his skill and his need to fight, to restore life and joy and the reasons for living, not just survival.” He adds that in his mind, Tommy realizes that the pattern he had fallen into once he joined the fireflies of killing people didn’t cease and that it likely “increased exponentially.”

He also talks of an emotional scene straight out of the game that the show is based on. This is a scene that he shares with Pedro Pascal. Luna describes how the pair worked together to make the scene true to the source material, and that they restructured the delivery and unfolding of it rather than change it.

Luna says, “It made it feel right in terms of the way we hit each of these beats: how I eventually build the courage to stand up to [Joel] and tell him the truth and tell him what is an extremely joyful thing for me but potentially a very hurtful thing for him to hear, that I was gonna be a father. That was pretty much the only scene on the slate that whole day. It was just Pedro and I being brothers and doing what brothers do: laughing, joking, needling each other, and eventually fighting.”

The scene is very powerful in that sense, and Luna does a good job of displaying Tommy as an empathetic man that is “rebuilding, reconstructing his spirit, reconstructing his heart, and building a family of his own in the name of survival”, via TV Guide. .

The Last of Us season one continues Sundays at 9/8c on HBO. The Last of Us episode seven will drop on February 26.

Photo credit: Raymond Flotat