Kaitlyn Dever Started Filming ‘Last of Us’ Murder Scene Three Days After Her Mom’s Funeral; Creators Changed Shot Order and Told Her to ‘Take All the Time You Need’ (2025)

SPOILER ALERT:This story contains spoilers forSeason 2, Episode 2 of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” now streaming on Max.

Kaitlyn Dever revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that she started filming her role of Abby on “The Last of Us” Season 2 just three days after her mother’s funeral. To make matters even more intense, the first sequences Dever shot for the show was Abby torturing Pedro Pascal’s Joel to death.

“It was just a massive scene emotionally, and with blocking, too,” Dever said. “There were so many moving parts and so many things to navigate… To be as honest as possible, I will just say that my days leading up to this scene were horrible.”

Dever’s mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at 39 years old and battled the disease for 14 years. She passed away in February 2024, just a few weeks before Dever was scheduled to begin production on “The Last of Us.”

“I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene [on‘The Last of Us’],” Dever said while discussing Abby’s murder of Joel. “My mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day. So I was sort of in a fog. I was in a daze.”

“The Last of Us” creative team did everything in their power to ensure Dever’s comfort on set, including overhauling the shooting schedule so that the scene could start filming with coverage shots that did not require Dever to be there so soon after her mother’s funeral. Per EW: “[Dever] then picked the day she felt most comfortable filming Abby’s big scene with Joel. The shoot was a closed set to limit the number of bystanders to the necessary people.”

“We said, ‘Take your time. Take all the time you need,'” series co-creator Craig Mazin said. “While I care extraordinarily about the show, it’s a TV show. I’m not going to disrupt someone’s grieving process for their own parent, especially [with] a show that’s partly about the grieving process.”

Dever added, “Because of my life circumstances, I wasn’t actually able to do my normal routine as an actor, which was really interesting because I was kind of worried about it. Usually if I have a monologue like that, I’m memorizing it three weeks before I do it. I had a different approach, and I think that it really served the character in a lot of ways. I was able to sort of… I don’t know, just really let it go and not think about it too much because the words on the page are so powerful anyway.”

Joel’s shocking murder is straight out of the “The Last Of Us Part II” video game. Dever’s Abby holds Joel hostage and reveals she is the daughter of the doctor he shot in the head in order to save Ellie. She then shoots Joel in the leg and bludgeons him with a golf club. After switching to her fists and beating him up, Abby delivers the fatal blow via a spike to Joel’s neck.

Pascal told HBO that “meeting Kaitlyn was amazing” and “it’s ironic that something so violent and tragic between characters can immediately bond you to the actor.” After the episode aired, he shared a selfie he took with Dever during the filming of the episode.