‘The Last of Us’ Co-Creator Craig Mazin Offers Update on Season 2, Season 3 Plans
Despite the simultaneous WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes currently in motion in Hollywood, The Last of Us Season 2 might hit HBO on schedule.
Craig Mazin, the co-creator of the post-apocalyptic drama, told Deadline he and the other writers of the show made inroads on the second season before the WGA strike deadline. “We got pretty far actually,” he said. “We were doing great.”
Mazin — pictured with TLOU stars Merle Dandridge and Pedro Pascal below — also revealed that the writers have a plan for the whole season, and they finished the script for the first episode. “So now I’m just walking around kind of brain-writing, I guess, which I don’t think is scabbing,” he said. “I take walks and I think through the scenes because when the bell rings and this is over because the companies have finally come to their senses, I’m going to have to basically shoot myself out of a cannon because we really want to try and get this show on the air when it’s supposed to be on the air.”
Liane Hentscher/HBO
Francesca Orsi, HBO’s head of drama, previously told Deadline that The Last of Us Season 2 would premiere sometime in 2025.
“We had a little more flexibility, I think, than normally, just because we had to wait a little bit longer anyway to line up production with the weather,” Mazin said of production of Season 2, which will be based in Vancouver. “A lot of what we do is outside, and so we had a schedule that weirdly hasn’t been immediately impacted. But we’re getting pretty close; we can’t keep our original start dates forever, obviously. If these strikes go much longer, we inevitably will have to push and that hurts us, and it hurts the audience, and it hurts HBO.”
HBO
The Last of Us’ first season — which earned 24 nominations this year, behind only Succession and its 27 noms — followed smuggler Joel (Pascal) and orphaned teen Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they journeyed across America in hopes of curing a fungal pandemic that turns humans into zombie-like “clickers.”
Season 1 translated the 2013 video game The Last of Us for the screen, and Season 2 will venture into the story of the game’s 2020 sequel, The Last of Us Part II. But the TV adaptation still has “more than one season” to go, Mazin told Deadline.
“There’s more story, so this show will not end with Season 2 unless people don’t watch it and we’ll get canceled,” he added. “Barring that, we will be doing some things exactly the way they were in the game. We’re going to do other things that are in the game, and we’re gonna do some things that are in the game, but we’re gonna do them differently in our own method. No matter if you have played the game or not. You will be surprised as the season unfolds. We have some interesting twists and turns.”
The Last of Us, Season 2, 2025, HBO
