Many years ago, “Fast & Furious” screenwriter Chris Morgan urged his friend Craig Mazin to try out a certain hit postapocalyptic video game. Mazin’s reaction? “Eh, zombies. Not high on my list.” But when Morgan finally wore him down, he bought a PlayStation and gave “The Last of Us” a spin. “I was just blown away,” he recalls. “I’ve never felt that much about a game—until ‘The Last of Us Part II.’ ” Now, he’s the co-creator and showrunner of HBO’s critically acclaimed adaptation.
Set in the aftermath of a fungal pandemic that’s transformed most of the human race into vicious, zombie-like creatures, “The Last of Us” follows the journey of jaded smuggler Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey), a teenager who might just be the key to curing the infection. More than two years after the release of the first season, which earned a whopping 24 Emmy nominations, the second installment debuted April 13.
Back when he first fell in love with the game, Mazin knew he wouldn’t be at the top of anyone’s list to bring the story to the small screen. At the time, he was a comedy guy, best known for co-writing the scripts of the third and fourth installments of “Scary Movie” and the second and third of “The Hangover.” He’s also co-hosted the popular screenwriting podcast “Scriptnotes” since 2011.
“I really wanted to work in the entertainment business. But it’s hard to break in and hard to stay in,” he explains. “I had a wife and kids, and I just understood that the more [projects] I did that got produced, the better I would get—because it’s in the making of things that you really learn.”
Though he’s since made the shift to dramatic work, Mazin believes that comedy is the ideal training ground for writers. “It’s the hardest thing to do, and the most technically demanding,” he says. “You are so accountable to the audience. And that is a discipline I apply as much as I can to dramas to make sure that we’re not being self-indulgent or boring.”
About a decade ago, Mazin finally felt he’d reached the point where he could go to his wife and say, “I think we’re OK; I can now take a swing and see what happens.” That first big gamble was his 2019 HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” which told the story of the infamous 1986 nuclear power plant meltdown. The show proved to be a home run, taking home 10 Emmys—including a win for outstanding limited series and a writing statuette for Mazin.
Suddenly, he found himself perfectly positioned to adapt “The Last of Us” for television. But first, he needed to convince the game’s co-creator Neil Druckmann, who had been struggling to get a film version off the ground for years, that it would find far more success on TV.
“I said, ‘Neil, what you’re trying to do is literally impossible,’ ” Mazin recalls. “ ‘If you take that story and push it down to movie length, what you’re going to get is a lot of plot. And the joy of “The Last of Us” is watching this relationship between this man and girl blossom into this beautiful parental thing, and going through those things within the context of that relationship.’ ” Not only did Druckmann agree—he signed on to co-create the series.
Mazin’s approach stems from his passion for the source material. “I began as a fan. So instead of me thinking, Well, fans will want to see this, or they need to see this, what I think is, I want to see this; I need to see this. I say, ‘OK, this is load-bearing; we don’t touch this. But this feels like an area where we can punch a hole through this wall and find a new room.’ And sometimes Neil’s the one who’s like, ‘We could touch this, though.’ And I’m like, ‘No—the fan in me says that stays right there.’ Our job is to enhance, explore, rearrange, reimagine, and rethink, but all within the matrix of understanding that we love the game.”
Season 1 covered the full arc of the first installment. But adapting “The Last of Us Part II” presented a unique challenge for the team since it tells a far more sprawling tale. This led to Mazin and Druckmann’s decision to break the story into multiple seasons. “As we expand our ambitions, each episode becomes bigger, more expensive, and more complicated,” Mazin says.
The first season culminates in (spoiler alert!) Joel going on a hospital-wide killing spree after he discovers that the doctors are planning to perform a fatal surgery on Ellie in order to synthesize a cure. When she wakes up from the anesthesia, Joel lies about what happened, claiming that the doctors had tested the procedure on others who had the cordyceps immunity with no success.
The second installment picks up five years later. Joel and Ellie are now living a quiet life in Jackson, Wyoming, but their relationship has become strained. “We know that he lied to her in a pretty huge way,” Mazin says. “And then when people get a little too complacent about how safe the walls [around the settlement] are, the world reminds them that, just as they’ve been evolving on the inside, the world out there is evolving, too.”
Though Mazin is both “thrilled” and “terrified” about how the second season turned out, he knows the effort was worth it. “Just like at the end of Season 1, I was like, How am I going to do this again?” he says. “I’m not going to be here forever, and I just think about how this is a big part of my life.”
This article originally appeared on Backstage.com
