‘The Last Of Us’ Director Kate Herron On Giving Ellie & Dina’s Feelings “Space To Breathe” & Expanding On Isaac’s Story In Episode 4

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Season 2, Episode 4 of HBO‘s The Last Of Us.

Sunday night’s episode of The Last Of Us Season 2 ups the ante as Ellie and Dina finally make it to Seattle and begin to realize they’ve stumbled upon a greater conflict that could spell more danger than they had previously anticipated.

The episode, directed by Kate Herron, opens with a flashback to 11 years earlier, when Seattle was still a FEDRA-controlled quarantine zone. The scene introduces Jeffrey Wright’s Isaac (reprising his role from the video game as the leader of the WLF), revealing that he was once affiliated with FEDRA until he betrays his unit and aligns himself with the rebels fighting against the militarized group. Both this and a later, harrowing scene of Isaac interrogating a Seraphite are new additions that are not from the game, greatly expanding audiences’ exposure to Isaac.

This is also a pivotal episode for Ellie and Dina, who get themselves into a good bit of trouble on their first day looking for Abby. An encounter with some WLF soldiers ends with Ellie saving Dina from an Infected, revealing her immunity when the monster bites her instead. After holding Ellie at gunpoint all night until she trusts that Ellie won’t turn, Dina tells Ellie that she’s pregnant with Jesse’s baby. As if that wasn’t enough of an emotional rollercoaster, their big admissions lead them both to finally admit to the feelings they’ve had for each other for quite some time.

“The thing I really liked about Episode 4 is Ellie and Dina are in a space where they’re in constant danger, and there’s very rarely moments for these quiet conversations or moments of joy,” Herron tells Deadline.

The episode ends with Ellie and Dina realizing they’re about to head into even more danger, with the stakes much higher than they were even just 24 hours ago. In the interview below, Herron breaks down finding the emotional center of some crucial scenes and how they set up for what’s to come.

DEADLINE: So first, how did you come on board to direct, and how did you find out you’d be doing Episode 4?

KATE HERRON: During lockdown, I bought a Playstation and then I text a load of my friends and was like, ‘Okay, what should I play?’ Because I basically had played a lot of Nintendo and a few games on my PC, but I had never played any PlayStation games, really. Obviously a game that came from nearly everyone was The Last of Us. So I played the first game, the prequel game, and then the second game, I think, came out pretty much at the same time. So I rolled right into the second game, and it just blew my mind in terms of what empathy in a video game could mean…I don’t know. I just thought it was one of the smartest games I’d ever played, and I absolutely loved it. Then obviously the first season of the TV show came out, and then once I saw that, I was like, ‘Oh, man, if they do a second season, I just really want to be a part of it.’ So they met me for the second season. And no, I didn’t know I was going to have Episode 4. I initially just spoke to them about my love for the game, the TV show. I think, honestly, Neil and Craig were probably meeting all these directors and then deciding, ‘Okay, this person is best for this moment, this person is best for this chapter.’ I was thrilled when I found out they wanted me to do Episode 4.

DEADLINE: This episode really feels so much like The Last of Us Part II. There are so many pivotal moments from the game. Was there one in particular that was the most daunting?

HERRON: So there’s one level of daunting that’s the subway, right? Because it’s just such a big piece of the scene. I’d done big action scenes before, so it wasn’t like alien to me, but just the nature of doing a scene like that… Obviously we change it a bit from the game, but I remember the mood and that bit in the game. So in my head, I was like, ‘Okay, I have to make sure it still has that wow factor for people.’ In terms of daunting honestly, filming wise, it was relatively simple, because Ellie’s playing a guitar, but obviously I wanted to make sure that ‘Take On Me’ hit the way it should for people and emotionally felt correct for the characters. So that was daunting, in the sense of, it’s a massive scene in the game. It’s very iconic, so I wanted to make sure that really worked for everybody.

DEADLINE: What was shooting that scene like for you? What were the directives to the actors to make that moment feel emotionally correct?

HERRON: They know these characters so well…I think for me, it was more just about offering a support system to them and making sure that what Craig had written emotionally felt true. I remember that we filmed quite a few versions of it in terms of emotion. I remember talking to Bella, and they agreed, and I was like, ‘Okay, well, let’s get one take where you don’t even look Izzy in the eye. Let’s try a shyer version.’ Things like that. I think you don’t necessarily end up using that as your whole take. It’s such an iconic scene. So I think for me, it was just about getting a range of levels and reactions to the song from both of them. But I think all four of us, like me, Bella, Izzy and Craig, we were all united on what we wanted that scene to feel like in the moment, and that was very important to us.

DEADLINE: The end of the episode takes a few big departures from the game, but it also still includes some iconic moments to the game, from Ellie’s immunity reveal to Dina’s pregnancy. How did you approach that scene from basically where Dina is holding Ellie at gunpoint through the end of the episode?

HERRON: I’m always gonna go back to the script in the sense of like, I think that the joy of making it feel in the game world is this takes place in the theater foyer, which is a very iconic space in the game. So that’s already doing so much heavy lifting for you. Because as someone who’s played the game, I’m watching it, and it doesn’t feel like it’s outside of the world of the game that I know. Also emotionally, the characters do get to the same point in the game. We’re just doing it in a slightly different way. To be honest, I really like how it is in Episode 4. I like that there’s a different way to tell a story in a game to a TV show, and I like that it has this slow burn and that we’re showing these episodes week-to-week, and last week’s episode people gonna be like, ‘What does she mean? You’re gay, and I’m not, like, what does that mean?’ It’s nice to answer that question in Episode 4 with Dina being like, ‘Actually, I lied, and this is actually how I feel.’ So I think for me as a director, the most important thing, honestly, again, is just giving it space to breathe. The thing I really liked about Episode 4 is Ellie and Dina are in a space where they’re in constant danger, and there’s very rarely moments for these quiet conversations or moments of joy, like ‘Take On Me.’ I think that that was really key for this conversation the next morning, is that they do get a kind of moment that isn’t unfamiliar to the audience watching, having a conversation with someone at the start of a relationship, and being like, ‘Okay, so what do you feel about this?’ So I think that it was just about giving it space to breathe.

DEADLINE: I also want to ask you about the expansion of Isaac’s character, and especially the scene of him interrogating the Seraphite. It’s quite a terrifying scene. How did you approach that?

HERRON: Craig and I had always spoken about the bigger themes of the show, like cycles of violence and that, with both sides of this fight, it shouldn’t be like there’s a clear good guy or bad guy, because there’s not at all. There never is. So I think that was really important to establish here. It’s a heavy scene to film. You know, like, most of stuff I’ve directed before is drama-comedy or comedy, but I think I approached it in the same way I’ve always approached stuff which was like, how do we just make this feel grounded and emotionally truthful? It was important to me that particularly the Seraphite felt like they still had fight. You know what I mean? It wasn’t like they weren’t just going to take that. So I think that it was important to see that…[and] just sort of letting the audience almost be this uncomfortable fly on the wall for this quite harrowing scene.

DEADLINE: How was it for you, as a fan of the game, to work on these scenes that add so much more depth to Isaac’s character?

HERRON: Well, it was a massive privilege in the sense of working with Jeffrey [Wright] and having that trust with Jeffrey and Craig to really dig into those scenes with them. I love all the places that the TV show has expanded from the game or taken us down paths we didn’t expect. I’ve always found that really interesting and very clever. So again, for me, it was like, Jeffrey knows that character back to front. So it’s always for me about supporting him and Craig and just being like, again, how do we deliver what the themes of the show are? So much is about choice, and that was something for me across every single scene in the show that echoes to every single character. Even Dina in this episode, deciding, ‘Okay, I need to Talk to Ellie about my actual feelings. I’m going to make the choice to be brave.’ So, very different to the choices that Isaac is making in the episode. But I always just thought that was such an interesting theme, and obviously, with the line ‘Make a choice,’ [in the beginning of the episode] and how that does have an echo effect across every scene that follows in the rest of the episode?

DEADLINE: I think this is the first episode where you really start to feel the weight of what Ellie and Dina are in Seattle to do, and it doesn’t necessarily feel heroic. How did you contend with that as a director and making the audience feel the weight of what they’re doing?

HERRON: I think that’s also what I found so interesting [in] the game. It isn’t heroic, what Ellie is doing, and you begin to realize that. I think that’s the same here. The most key thing in Episode 4 is that Abby is not just with a group of her friends. She’s part of something much larger, and a war that Ellie and Dina are yet to understand. I think that is what’s really important in this episode, is that they live in a world where, yes, people are very dangerous, but the Infected are usually one of the greatest dangers. But that’s actually not the truth. They’ve encountered very dangerous people before, obviously, in both their lives. But here it’s like, okay, this is on a different level. The people here are actually going to be very dangerous to us. Do we want to get entangled with these kind of people? So I really enjoyed the complication of that.