That shocking ‘The Last of Us’ death, final seasons for ‘The Boys’ and ‘Cobra Kai,’ and more from Sony TV actors and showrunners
Few TV deaths have been as shocking as the one suffered by Pedro Pascal on The Last of Us. Anyone who has played the PlayStation video game from which the show is adapted knew that Pascal's character, Joel Miller, was doomed from the start, yet his demise midway through Season 2 still came as a surprise. And as game creator and series cocreator Neil Druckmann revealed during a recent FYC event for Sony Television some higher-ups were desperate to keep it from happening for as long as possible.
As Druckmann recalled, he had a conversation with Casey Bloys, CEO of HBO, who said, "I just got off the call with this agent, and he yelled at me: 'Why didn't you offer those guys millions of dollars to not kill Pedro?'" Bloys, to his credit, said, "A deal's a deal. We have to adapt the material." This was the first time that Craig Mazin, who adapted the game for television with Druckmann, heard anything about this, and he immediately asked, "Wait, that was on the table? I totally would've done it for millions of dollars."
Druckmann and Mazin were among the many participants in a wide-ranging Q&A on behalf of Sony Pictures Television, which took place on the Sony lot in Culver City, Calif. The event showcased multiple shows produced by Sony this year, including The Boys, Cobra Kai, Dark Matter, Doc, Long Bright River, The Night Agent, and Outlander. Actors and showrunners from each of the series offered insights into the relationship between the written word and the performers who bring it to life.
Among those present were Isabela Merced, who joined The Last of Us as Dina, Ellie's (Bella Ramsey) girlfriend. No matter what the character, Merced reveals she imbues them with traces of "the people I love in my life, the people that I see parts of myself in and see parts of me in them. We're just projections of people we love anyways, so I just make sure to channel that." In the case of Dina, she drew from her mother, because the character is "very calculated, but she's also very caring of the people that she loves. She's very maternal, and not just because she's pregnant. She's very in touch with her emotions, and my mom is that way. She inspires me in many ways."
Representing The Boys, which is entering its final season, were creator Eric Kripke and actor Antony Starr. "We start the very final episode tomorrow," Kripke told the audience, who groaned knowing that one of their favorite shows would soon be off the air. It's been a long journey for Starr, who has portrayed the villainous superhero Homelander for four seasons. "We said right from the very beginning we didn't want any mustache-twirling," he recalled of his initial conversations with Kripke. "We wanted to create something from the ground up, inside out, that just happened to be a psychopathic version of Superman. I've always thought that his humanity was his kryptonite."
As The Boys prepares to shoot its final episode, Cobra Kai has aired its last season, and creator Josh Heald and star William Zabka were both present to bid farewell. It was especially bittersweet for Zabka, who first played Johnny Lawrence in the original Karate Kid all the way back in 1984. "There was a moment in Season 1 when I realized Johnny wasn't mine anymore," Zabka stated. The creators "wanted to give Johnny the Better Call Saul treatment, kind of beat him down and make him an antihero." After filming one scene that he was particularly resistant to, he realized, "Johnny Lawrence doesn't belong to me anymore. This is their vision, I'm going to go with it." That led to "jumping point after jumping point of pushing the limits and stretching me, and making me uncomfortable, which plays into the character. It wasn't until season one came out that I realized they nailed it."
Representing Dark Matter were stars Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly, as well as creator Blake Crouch, who adapted the series from his own novel. "You just have to go to any awards ceremony to know that actors do need a script," Edgerton joked, summing up the theme of the evening. "We can't do it on our own; it's a collaboration." As a performer, "I need guardrails, and the guardrails are Blake's understanding of character, and what he lays out story-wise. We can contribute, and we can offer up thoughts of what we know, but essentially it feels like you're building a car and we get to drive it."
The evening also featured discussions with Doc star Scott Wolf, showrunner Barbie Kligman, and executive producer Hank Steinberg; Long Bright River showrunner Nikki Toscano and author Liz Moore; The Night Agent creator Shawn Ryan; Outlander executive producer Maril Davis; and Cobra Kai co-creator Hayden Schlossberg. The evening also featured a panel with stunt coordinators for The Boys (John Koyama) and Cobra Kai (Ken Barefield) and the fight coordinator for The Night Agent (Josh Fried).