As the showrunner and co-creator of The Last of Us, Craig Mazin is in charge of all the big decisions, ensuring the vision is brought to life accurately.

Working alongside Neil Druckmann, who also co-created the game, Mazin was aware of the massive job ahead of him – but after high praise for previous series Chernobyl, it was something he clearly knew he could do.

With the success of season one making The Last of Us must-watch television, Mazin talks about the making of season two, what lies beyond, and the highs and lows of adapting one of the most beloved video games of all time.

After the first season, there was a generalized kind of anxiety. ‘How are we going to top that? How are we going to even match it?’ I think we did do something pretty extraordinary.

So the fear was, ‘How the hell am I going to do that again?’ But the comforting part was: You don’t really change the process.

The process is the rock that holds it all together. So the process is: I draw from the source material that I love. I work with the guy who created the source material. And in this case, also with [writer] Halley Gross, who helped create the story of the second game. We adapt it using the same method we did in season one for season two. We continue to adapt forward in that way, which is to always ask the question: What would make the best TV show? Where do we have opportunities to do things differently that will therefore be more effective in this medium? Do we do new things or do exactly what it is in the game?

We have good instincts, I think, about that sort of thing. We discuss everything in depth. We plan it very, very carefully. We’re always thinking about both sides of the audience; some who know the source material extraordinarily well. There’s an audience that doesn’t know it at all. Our job is to tell a great story for both of those audiences. And one nice thing, I think, about the way we adapt is that if you are super familiar with the story of the game, you’re still going to get some surprises. You’re still going to get new things, new characters, new twists, all of which hopefully still feel fully in the spirit of the source material.

The biggest problem that has faced video adaptations for quite a long time, I think it’s changed now, is that the people adapting it didn’t love the game. They were just adapting some IP. They were told ‘This is popular, but don’t worry about what’s in there. Just do the story and we’ll slap this name on it.’ They don’t understand where the love for the game is.

The other challenge for some adaptations is that a lot of games themselves are adaptations of other things. You can’t help but be struck by how influenced Halo is by James Cameron’s Aliens; Space Marines – Xenomorphs. So, for some games— as brilliant as they are to experience and play — they are themselves already drawing on something. This means by the time you adapt them you’re doing a little bit of an echo of an echo.

That was not the case with The Last of Us. We had the benefit of this incredibly rich narrative and these great characters and a game that centered a relationship, even while it was so much fun to play. But I see things changing. The work that the team did on [Prime Video’s] Fallout, for instance, was fantastic. You could tell they loved the game. So for us, that passion for the source material is sort of the key, and I think we’re seeing that more and more now.

Well there were things we couldn’t do in season one because we literally didn’t know how! Season one of a show is a tough thing. You’re kind of building an airplane in the sky, learning as you go and as much as you plan, hope and imagine... so much of it is a theory.

As you start shooting, you see ‘Okay, these relationships are popping forward and they’re amazing. Okay here is something we designed and it didn’t quite come out the way we had hoped. Let’s background on it a little bit. Let’s shift and reprioritize.’ So when you get to a season two, you are able to apply all of that knowledge. And I think our ambitions for season two were much higher. We had the capability to do some fairly extraordinary set pieces, expand the scope of action and threat and danger. But we still follow our same basic rule, which is: It has to all be in service of character and relationship. All of it.

We don’t do an action set piece for noise. We do it because it’s going to fundamentally change something about the humans in it and the way we perceive those characters will shift as a result of those scenes. Impact is not about noise. Impact is about character relationships. I think we were able to do that in a more spectacular way in season two.

The questions I always ask are: ‘What is this season about? What are we trying to say? What’s the point?’ I’m a big believer in: If we are creating a season of television and don’t know the point of it, how the hell is the audience going to know?

Everything needs to be purposeful. I don’t believe in wasting people’s time, nor wasting HBO’s money. We are very careful. I ask Neil – like all day long – and Halley, too ‘Okay in the game, this happens. Why? In the game, this person does this. Why? Where was that person from? Why are they like this? What can we do to enrich and connect?’ So I start with big-picture questions and then ask exploration questions. ‘How do we want to tell that story? What parts of that story were there to service gameplay more than narrative? What parts were there for the narrative that we really want to just hold on to as a pillar?’ Then we start to break out, and it takes time.

I know sometimes people are like, why the f**k does it take so long to get the show made? (Laughs) Then we see the end result and understand why. It’s one of those things where it takes time to get it as good as we can get it. I’m never going to announce that my show is good. That will be for other people to determine. But it is as good as we can make it.

It’s funny...we didn’t have the benefit of a show like ours having previously existed to kind of lean on and go, ‘It’ll be okay because this other TV show adapted this huge video game franchise and everything turned out great!’ Part of the fear was: No matter what you do, the game fandom is just going to reject it. ‘That person doesn’t look like the character. This person doesn’t sound like the character. You took out my favourite thing.’

But there was much love and understanding from the game fandom. They got what we were doing and they made space for it, and we were so overwhelmed by that, I think, because we really were nervous. That kind of feedback was incredible to hear.

Good taste? (Laughs) Until I first played the game about 11 years ago, I’d never had that kind of experience before. I’ve been playing video games since the Atari 2600 but had never felt that kind of connection; that profound feeling. It was so expertly crafted; even in the gameplay, it was always pushing you towards this feeling that you had for this kid; a parental thing. And then to switch perspective and put you in Ellie’s shoes... you feel an entirely different kind of fear and hope. The ending is heartbreaking. I’d never felt anything like that.

I think the second game took all of that and amplified it even further in a way that I thought was just remarkably brave, smart and beautiful. People connect with it. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I recall Naughty Dog saying, when we first pitched to HBO, that the game was fairly close to parity in terms of gender; that men and women liked it equally. I think it’s easy to think, ‘Men think of games like this and women think of games like this; this is the boy game and this is the girl game.’ But I think it’s truer and truer now, that gender is irrelevant. It’s a question of your interest in empathy and connection with these characters and their relationship.

It’s true, and that’s why it’s so both daunting and inspiring to adapt this material because you are afraid you’ll get it wrong— but you’re so excited by the prospect of getting it right. That goes directly to what you’re talking about: that these characters mean something to us.

We watched Ellie grow up. We’ve even shown Ellie being born. I think we are properly fascinated by her because she’s so many of the things that I would hope to be if the world were like that; but there are also parts of her that I think are dark and dangerous. This is not a finished person. When we meet Luke Skywalker, he’s a young adult on the cusp of either being this or that. And so is Ellie.

When you take characters like that and you put enormous pressure on them, and the world punishes them, especially punishes them when they do the right thing, when they open themselves up and create vulnerability, the world punishes them for it, will they retract? Will they regress? Will they just drift towards their darkest impulses? Or will they somehow figure out how to evolve and become the person that we would want to be and we hope they will get the chance to be? Then that’s everything to us.

When we meet Joel and Ellie this season, five years have gone by, which in and of itself implies that things must have been going pretty well. They’re still alive. They live in Jackson, and even between the two of them, things must have been going well. You can’t exist in a state of conflict with somebody like that for five straight years. It’s not possible.

But we also know that Joel lied to her. We know that Joel did what he did and lied to her. And now Ellie is 19. Whatever positive relationship they’ve had is now clearly strained, and interestingly Joel is trying to figure out why, which in and of itself implies that this is not something that’s been going on for five years; it’s somewhat recent. Why is she angry? He’s going to therapy to figure out how to deal with what he thinks – or I should say, what he hopes – is a standard ‘I’ve got a 19 year old kid who’s wanting independence, turning away and rejecting Dad. But what’s really going on? Can I do something differently?’ and we have this wonderful new therapist-character Gail, played brilliantly by Catherine O’Hara, and her point is, ‘No, I don’t believe that is what’s going on.’ You can see that inside Joel, there is this suspicion that somehow, it is this flaw that he introduced into their relationship; this lie that maybe is starting to be the problem. Ellie’s relationship with Joel has taken an interesting turn and we’re not quite sure how or why. There’s a mystery at the heart of it.

Season one was so much about love; how it can be weaponized, how it can corrupt and lead to horrible acts. In season two, we start to see how groups that are united by love can begin to identify as ‘us’ and see everybody else as ‘them.’

Tribalism is a love among a few or maybe many. For Jackson, their tribe is the community. It’s everything inside the wall. Or as Joel says, ‘What’s inside the wall? People. What’s outside? Monsters. Everyone outside is ‘them.’ And we are ‘us.’ But Ellie’s not really a ‘community person.’ Maybe Ellie’s just an Ellie person, or maybe Ellie’s tribe is just Ellie and Joel, and her tribe is sort of struggling. And with these kinds of identifications, the risk is: By protecting the people we love and maintaining loyalty to that community, and that pro-social nature that humans have, we begin to other and dehumanize everybody else.

What I think our source material does brilliantly and what we’ve tried to do ourselves as best we can is force the audience to keep going around. Who is us and who is them? And we will keep moving you until you start to feel extremely uncomfortable. Because narrative that doesn’t let you have an us and a them is uncomfortable. And that’s where we kind of want you to be because who’s ‘good’ and who’s ‘bad’ becomes very muddied.

We’re not proponents of both sides-ism, because there are people who do bad things. David from season one was running the cannibal community and had these terrible impulses towards Ellie. There’s no other side there. He’s wrong. But if you have another community behind a wall, and they are hurt by somebody, well that somebody is a monster to them. And we do incur costs. When we love someone and protect somebody, it can almost be a zero-sum game. If I keep you safe, maybe that means endangering someone else. And then there’s a price.

Ellie’s in an interesting position: The world essentially ended in 2003; it hasn’t experienced the progress that we’ve experienced in the last 22 years. Even though Ellie is not ‘closeted,’ she has never lived in a world where there are pride flags. In fact, Ellie and Dina encounter the flags this season and have no idea what they are. Dina also doesn’t quite know what to do about the fact that she doesn’t have a sexuality that everybody seems to call normal. So, the two of them are struggling their way towards something.

Ellie is impulsive, but powerful. She is fearless. She has a superpower, which is immunity. She is decisive and that is attractive. Dina is a lot of the other things. She’s smart, fun, charming, shrewd, careful and strategic. They need each other. They complement each other beautifully.

The question is: What does it mean for somebody like Ellie to expand her community beyond just Joel? And can she? I can’t wait for people to see Ellie and Dina’s relationship develop over this season. I think Bella and Isabela together are just magical; it’s quite a thing to watch. People talk about chemistry ... boy, they’re fun. And boy, do we need a little of that in a show like ours.

I hope so. I always look for what’s universal. Here I am, a 50-something straight white guy writing a story between these two characters. But I talk to people, I do my homework and, without getting into my personal life, there are family members that are close to me and wehave these discussions.

It’s important to me that everyone can see themselves in this series; anybody who is yearning for somebody, but also afraid; anybody who experiences the impossible-to-imagine magic of somebody liking them as much as much as they like them. That’s just a beautiful thing. I think everybody can find something inspiring in that, I hope.

It’s a great question. I almost don’t want to put it into words because I’m afraid that it’ll mess up how it all works in my head! I will say that I love how brave he is narratively; how there is no sense of what would be ‘easy;’ what would be the most comforting thing.

Neil wants the audience to feel conflicted. He wants them to feel confused. He wants them to feel emotionally ambivalent. And I think that’s exciting and not always necessarily my first instinct as a writer. People still are debating about Joel’s actions at the end of season one, and they will be debating all sorts of things by the time we get to the end of season two.