Josh Peck Randomly Showed Up in The Last of Us

The following story contains spoilers for season 2, episode 4 of The Last of Us, “Day One.”

SOMETHING THAT’S ALWAYS interesting about The Last of Us—and other shows like it—is that when something is written, produced, and executed in the right way, there may be a wide array of different kinds of reactions to it. When someone makes a choice, you could feel one way or another. When someone dies, emotions can go in all sorts of different directions. When a villain emerges, it might be possible to entirely hate them or kind of empathize with them.

But in the opening scene of “Day One,” the second episode of The Last of Us’s seven-episode second season, it’s safe to say that everyone watching had the exact same thought and reaction: “Is that Josh Peck?”

And the answer to that question is, indeed, yes. Josh Peck shows up in an episode-opening flashback to 2018 as a FEDRA soldier named Janowitz. Janowitz is a blabbermouth soldier telling his fellow service members about a past experience taking advantage of quarantine zone citizens who have had their rights taken away, or, as he calls them in an insulting, seemingly widespread slang term, “voters.” The story is fairly straightforward: he was detaining one person for “disseminating,” when a fellow violent and not smart soldier named Greenberg showed up, and thought that meant the “voters” were “jerking off and splooging in the streets.” Janowitz says he knew better than to correct him, but that the person being detained couldn’t help themself. He says Greenberg slammed the person’s head into the wall, breaking their teeth and face, before saying “Nobody asked you, jizzboy!”

The Humvee full of soldiers breaks out in uproarious laughter, with only the green Burton curious about what any of it means. Really, though, the scene serves to introduce Isaac Dixon (the great Jeffrey Wright), a FEDRA sergeant who has clearly grown dissuaded with everything going on. When the vehicle comes up against a Washington Liberation Front (WLF, the group we know Abby is a part of) blockade, Isaac gets out, tells Burton to come with him, and meets face to face with the WLF’s leader, Hanrahan (Alanna Ubach), and reveals that he’s now part of their fight. He then throws a couple grenades in the Humvee with Janowitz and company, and guns down the driver who’s able to crawl out.

With ease—and in a pretty fantastically written and produced scene—we’re able to understand exactly who Isaac is and what he’s all about. And you need someone as gross and icky as Peck’s Janowitz in order to get there.

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Is that really Josh Peck in The Last of Us?

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It sure is. Peck, who is still best known for his roles on Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show and Drake and Josh as a child actor, plays the FEDRA soldier Janowitz in The Last of Us. It’s Peck’s second unexpected role in a major drama in the last couple years; in 2023, he played the physicistKenneth Bainbridge in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

As Isaac’s backstory is not a part of The Last of Us Part II game, the opening scene was made specifically for the TV show. That means Peck’s character, the lewd and crude Janowitz, was also created specifically for the show—and he clearly made the character into precisely what the show needed him to be in order to properly introduce Isaac.

“It’s important that you have empathy for your characters, even when they are despicable, because otherwise I don’t really know how to humanize them,” Peck said in an interview with Variety. “What gave me a great insight into this guy was I had to personalize the story in a way. Obviously, nothing in my life could ever match up to something this extreme and horrible, thankfully, but I could relate it to just telling my friends one of my favorite stories that still cracks me up…He’s talking to his co-workers, his friends and telling a story that happens to be pretty terrible.”

Peck also spoke about the quality of The Last of Us production, putting it in the same breath as his experience working on Nolan’s Best Picture-winning Oppenheimer.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that anything I’ve done that’s been at a higher level, be it something like Oppenheimer or this or when I’ve gotten the chance to work with great actors, it feels refreshingly easy because everything has been worked out,” he said in the same interview. “There are no holes in the script. Everyone is at the top of their game, and you feel excited to be a part of that team.”

Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.