Young Mazino Wouldn’t Change a Thing About That Last of Us Moment

The following story contains spoilers for season 2, episode 7 of The Last of Us.

WHEN WE LAST spoke to Young Mazino about playing Jesse, the even-keeled if equally brusque foil to Bella Ramsey’s Ellie in season 2 of The Last of Us, he teased a moment of reckoning between the two in tonight’s finale. “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.” Jesse and Tommy’s attempts to pull her out of that cycle represented one of the episode’s central conflicts, and just as it appears their entreaties have worked, they’re all dragged back into a cycle of revenge—this time Abby’s as she gets the jump on the crew. We couldn’t resist asking Mazino about a moment that follows in the games and, as it turns out, would be recreated with the same brutality in the show: the split-second that Abby unceremoniously shoots Jesse in the face. It’s a vicious killing with no greater meaning or reason other than Jesse unknowingly getting between two people caught in a blood feud. But to Mazino, the death was essential to the show’s overall story: the more we know—and, for what it’s worth, the more we like—Jesse, the more we understand that that nobody in the show, regardless of screen time, is just cannon fodder. Behind that split-second death, and every split-second death, is a full life. Below, read an outtake for our talk with Mazino, where the 33-year actor shares some thoughts on the way Jesse goes out, and how it represents the narrative goals of the show.

MH: As you were receiving the scripts for the season and seeing how many changes were being made to the source material, did you ever think, “Hey, maybe I won’t die after all?”

YM: Nah, Craig was pretty specific about me getting my head blown off. He was like, “That has to happen. That’s going to happen. Get ready.” His goal was to get as many people to like the character as much as possible. He wanted me to be the coolest, chillest, most likable character—and then to get merced in the face. I think that’s a pivotal point of the game, where you realize that no one’s safe and that the world is savage. So I think that was something that he wanted to maintain.

MH: It speak to the themes of the game too. The audience spends time with these characters, who are pillars of their community, who have rich inner lives—and then they’re killed in the crossfire of some stranger’s vendetta. The needlessness of the death is itself the statement, and it’s powerful in its own way.

YM: Yeah, there’s a disconnect when we see things on the media about, like, 54 people killed in a mass shooting or something. There’s this notion called “sonder,” the feeling when you realize that each of those individual had full lives and full emotions and their own stories; they were their own protagonists. And suddenly they’re just wiped out. Think about the World Wars, how many tens of millions of people died, or the Russian Revolution, where the Bolsheviks killed 20 million people. Those numbers are so obscene and absurd that it’s hard to understand what they mean. But when you scale it down to just an individual, and you watch them cinematically—you walk with them, you talk with them, you see them in their daily life—then you blow them away, it hits harder. That’s part of this interesting mechanism in cinema where you can really understand the meaning of sonder in a way that’s more visceral than when you just see a headline in the news or read something in the history books. It’s gargantuan, the crimes that man has committed against man, and I think the Last of Us as a game and as a show really of captures, like you said, how people get caught in the crossfire of other people’s vendettas. It’s partly a commentary on the nature of violence and the nature of of revenge, and how, if you get lost in that sauce, you oftentimes get stuck there forever.

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.”