Ah, there it is: Just a few hours after dropping the news that Game Of Thrones co-star star Bella Ramsey would be starring as half of the central duo at the heart of its TV adaptation of video game sensation The Last Of Us, HBO has now dropped the identity of the other half of the equation…played, as it turns out, by Game Of Thrones co-star Pedro Pascal.
Specifically, Pascal will play Joel Miller, the grieving father and grizzled survivor who players control through most of 2013's The Last Of Us, guiding his young charge Ellie across a United States ravaged by a zombie-like disease. Voiced by Troy Baker in the games, Joel has quite a bit in common with Pascal’s other big character of the moment, The Mandalorian’s Din Djarin, in that both are surrogate dads who eventually become fiercely, sometimes homicidally protective of their adoptive charges.
It’s not clear yet what The Last Of Us, which already has a green light from HBO, under the writing and production aegis of Chernobyl’s Craig Mazin, might mean for Pascal’s future on The Mandalorian. In any case, we have to give credit to Mazin and the series’ casting team, because this is the second time in a day we’ve had to nod our heads and go, “Okay, yeah, we can see that” when the two most vitally important casting decisions for this series came down the line.