Mandalorian actor Pedro Pascal will play joel Miller in the game's live-action adaptation of The Last Survivor. Recently he has publicly stated that he has never played a game, in part because he does not want to have the urge to "imitate" Joel when playing the role.
In a new interview with GQ, Pascal was asked about his familiarity with the Last of Us game. He said he initially tried playing the game (presumably the first one), but eventually handed the controller to his nephew after discovering that he didn't have the "necessary skills" to complete it.
Pascal said he watched his nephew play for a while that day, but other than that, he didn't seem to have seen much of the game either. The actor said it was because he didn't want to get too close to the characters in the game when filming the live-action version.
"I think Joel was very impressive – I thought the whole game was a visually breathtaking experience. Then I started worrying that I would want to imitate too much, which I thought might be true in some cases, but a mistake in others. So I just wanted to keep a healthy distance so that [co-writers] Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann could have more control over that. ”
Pascal can only vaguely describe the script in terms of how similar the series and the game are, describing the live-action adaptation as "a very, very creative way to respect what's important while preserving the most iconic content of the game experience." He added that the series includes "something you might not necessarily predict." He also compared the series to The Mandalorian, arguing that the two also have similarities in this regard.
At present, the series has not released any preview, and it is speculated that it will land on the HBO Max streaming platform at the end of 2022.