‘The Last of Us’ star Kaitlyn Dever lost her mom weeks before *that* scene. How it impacted her

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 2 of “The Last of Us.”

“The Last of Us” star Kaitlyn Dever was coping with the loss of her mother when she had to film Season 2’s most shocking scene yet — when her character Abby kills Joel, the beloved character portrayed by Pedro Pascal.

Dever opened up in an interview with Entertainment Weekly about her experience shooting Episode 2 just weeks after her mother, Kathy, died due to complications from breast cancer in 2024.

“To be as honest as possible,” she said, “I will just say that my days leading up to this scene were horrible.”

“I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene,” she added, “and 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.”

Abby killed Joel to exact revenge for him killing her own father in Season 1. Abby’s father was a Firefly working to find a vaccine for the deadly Cordyceps fungus. Their plan was to use Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) brain, as she is immune — killing her in the process. Joel couldn’t let that stand so he broke her out of the facility and perpetuated a massacre in the process.

Craig Mazin, one of the show’s creators, told Entertainment Weekly that he and the team told Dever to take all the time she needed to prepare for shooting the scene.

“While I care extraordinarily about the show, it’s a TV show,” Mazin said. “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.”

The crew ended up reworking the shooting schedule so that Dever could pick the day she felt the most comfortable filming, and they shoot the footage in a closed set.

“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,” Dever said. “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,” she continued. “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.”

Dever announced her mother’s death on Instagram in February 2024, remembering the time she spent with her in the caption of the post.