Young Mazino Is Up For the Challenge

IF ONE DAY you want to survive a post-apocalyptic world by hitching your cart to someone more capable’s wagon, you could do a lot worse than Young Mazino. In season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us, the 33-year-old actor plays Jesse, a paragon of capability: he can ride a horse, shoot a gun, swing a sledgehammer—and as the actor playing him, so can Mazino. But what makes Jesse such a notable foil to Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), whose ouroboros of revenge quests forms the central conflict of both the second Last of Us game and its TV adaptation, is that he deploys his particular set of skills in service of the big picture and of his community. When, at the end of the first season, Joel (Pedro Pascal) prioritizes Ellie’s life over the potential survival of mankind, he kicks off a deadly chain of events: he kills Abby’s father, the doctor meant to extract a Cordyceps cure from Ellie by way of a procedure she wouldn’t survive; so Abby kills Joel, prioritizing vengeance over healing; so Ellie goes on the hunt for Abby, prioritizing her own vengeance over the safety of herself, her friends, and her community. As viewers, we empathize with them even as we recognize the ways the cycle of violence is corrosive to their humanity.

In contrast, when Jesse enters the fray at the end of episode 5, following Ellie to Seattle and pulling her out of a firefight, it represents a surprising shift in priorities for his character. (At least for those who have’t played the game.) But in this week’s upcoming season finale, Mazino says, we’ll see that Jesse didn’t make the choice lightly.

Liane Hentscher/HBO

Chatting with Mazino from his family home in Virginia, where he appears nestled among trees as far as Zoom’s resolution can capture, its clear that he doesn’t take Jesse’s character—or the themes of The Last of Us—lightly either. He threads them through his own personal experience (“I had a chip on my shoulder growing up,” he says. “But getting older, I’ve learned to relinquish that chip and not let it define me”), through world events (“We have people in positions of power all over the world who are exercising their agendas with brutality”), and through the lens of art and acting. You get the sense that he’s the kind of guy who could build you a shelter after the apocalypse, sure, but who would be just as interested in building a better world. He talked to Men’s Health about all that—and previews what we can expect in the final The Last of Us episode of the season.

MH: In this season of The Last of Us, Jesse retrieves Ellie, Dina, and Joel’s body after his murder. He’s not present in those scenes in the game. How did you incorporate that change into Jesse’s character?

YOUNG MAZINO: Well, Jesse is known to be very level-headed. In the second episode, there’s a scene where he’s talking to Ellie about how Joel had to “put down” Eugene, Gail’s husband. He says, “What are you gonna do? Couldn’t be saved.” And that’s just a cold reality of their lives. Jesse isn’t exempt from that feeling that life, for them, is fleeting. That death is just something that everyone has to live with.

I keep coming back to that line: “What are you gonna do? Couldn’t be saved.” Joel falls under that same umbrella. Ellie was definitely much closer to Joel, but Jesse does feel his death too. It’s just that the way he responds to it is different from Ellie. Instead of going towards the darkness and focusing on revenge and more murder, he focuses on rebuilding. Joel wasn’t the only one who died that day—many other people in their community lost their lives. When you look at it holistically, if you’re trying to survive and thrive, you can’t be fixated on one death when there are so many other lives to take care of, when what they need more than anything is to rebuild and fortify as quickly as possible. That’s why the third episode opens with him literally rebuilding—shoveling and sledgehammering and doing what he can to to help Jackson get back on its feet. That sums up his character. It’s very Jesse.

MH: He’s an interesting foil to the other central characters in that he makes his choices to benefit the greater community, whereas the choices Joel made at the end of the first season, and that Abby and Ellie make this season, place the individual over the collective.

YM: It’s also very apparent in the writing for the seventh episode. That’s when you’ll really see the differences between Ellie and Jesse and in the ways they think. I think Jesse understands where Ellie’s coming from—but how far down the path can he go with her before he realizes she’s way too far gone, she’s lost, and that nothing’s going to stop her? Some people just get stuck in a negative feedback loop, and the choices they make keep them trapped in that cycle. That’s a very real challenge that people deal with all the time in real life too.

Personally, I had a chip on my shoulder growing up, and it had been fuel for a lot of things I did in my life. Getting older, I’ve learned to relinquish that chip and not let it define me. Because fixating on it can be so all-consuming. It can narrow all your focus down onto one single thing. It’s like the saying: If you focus only on the leaf, you don’t see the tree, and if you focus only on the tree, you don’t see the forest. Maybe that comes with time and age. Ellie is not just young, but a very specific individual that had a very specific, horrifying experience. That would consume me too, and I don’t think Jesse is above it either. I really do think he understands, but he’s choosing to try and uphold a greater responsibility, which is to be the next leader of his community, and of Jackson.

ANGELLA CHOE

MH: When Jesse appears in Seattle in episode 5, where is his head at?

YM: When Jesse arrives in the fifth episode, he tells Ellie that if he and Tommy didn’t leave right after Ellie and Dina did, they would have died out there. Two people going into an active war zone, in unknown territory, trying to find a specific individual—Ellie and Dina are undertaking a suicide mission. I can imagine the conversation Jesse had with Tommy, deciding to break all his own rules to go out and try to save them. I remember talking with [showrunner Craig Mazin] and going over the scene of Jesse getting there right in the nick of time. He said, “Yo, Jesse is pissed. He is livid. He doesn’t want to be there. He’s not supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be there. But they went.” Jesse and Tommy had to go through a lot of shit just to get to them.

MH: The show plays with different conceptions of justice, and the ways justice and revenge and violence and revolution can get all mixed up.

YM: True revolution unfortunately comes with violence. It’s almost necessary. Part of the reason people gravitate to this show is because it’s this gratuitous, cathartic experience, imagining living in a world that’s post-apocalyptic. Right now, we live in a system that’s controlled by corporate oligarchs. We have people in positions of power all over the world who are exercising their agendas with brutality. I can bring up any number of ongoing conflicts—whether it’s somebody trying to destabilize another region, or somebody trying to take over land that they think is owed to them for some reason, or so many other examples. But in The Last of Us, the conflict is very clear—it boils down to just one question: “Can we survive?”

MH: This season does flesh out the backstories of both the WLF and the Seraphites, bringing more of those real-world themes into the show more explicitely.

YM: I love the conflict that’s going on between WLF and the Seraphites. One faction turned to military might and the other faction turned to religious zealotry. At a certain point, neither side remembers who drew first blood, even though both sides have lost children, women, and men. It’s a microcosm of what’s going on in the real world—death begets death begets death. Those kinds of conflicts are a part of the human condition, and never seem to go away.

Liane Hentscher/HBO

MH: Jesse is very different from Paul, the character you played in Beef. Paul was this lost, ineffectual guy who really wanted to step up. Jesse has already stepped up when we meet him. He’s already a pillar of his community, a very different conception of masculinity and the pressures we put on ourselves. Is there another type of character you want to explore on screen?

YM: I just want something I can sink my teeth into. I want roles that challenge me. And I want something all-consuming, whether it requires me to drive a taxi for six months to get in character or to go through a boot camp, or something like that. I thrive off of inhabiting a life I normally wouldn’t be able to live.

I studied anthropology when I was in college, and I loved that study of humans. There’s a book called Righteous Dopefiend, and the authors [anthropologists Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg] lived with homeless heroin addicts under a bridge in San Fransisco to really understand the psyche of that community by going through their day to day with them. I think, as an actor, the job is to bring as much truth as I can. I don’t know if I have enough talent to just show up on day one and crank out a performance the way I’d need to. I need time to really sit with the material. Then part of me wants to just put on a suit of armor and swing a sword around. I love the physicality of that, and you can lose yourself in that too.

MH: One of your Beef directors, Jake Schreier, just directed Thunderbolts* and now it’s rumored that he’s being considered to direct the upcoming X-Men movie. Maybe you should give Jake a call and let him know who your favorite X-Man is….

YM: You know, Jake is one of those rare filmmakers nowadays who really cares about the craft of filmmaking. He recommended one of his favorite films to me, Pierrot le Fou by Jean-Luc Godard. He’s into the classics; He’s a true film lover. I trust his vision in anything. I think whatever he chooses to do, whoever he decides to cast, it would be great. So, I’m not going to pester him—I’m just going to wait and see what he does.

But I don’t know if X-Men is in my future. I’m looking at playing, like, a retired pastor in a low-budget indie. I’ve had some really interesting projects come my way, but I’m just following this flow and seeing where it takes me.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Nojan Aminosharei is the Entertainment Director of Men’s Health and the Special Projects Editor of Harper’s Bazaar. He was previously the Entertainment Director of Hearst Digital Media, and before that a Senior Editor at GQ. Raised in Vancouver, Canada, Nojan graduated from NYU with a master’s degree in magazine journalism. The late Elaine Stritch once told him, “What the fuck kind of name is Nojan? I’m 89 years old, I don’t have time for that shit.”