How many times were you rendered speechless by what the The Last of Us looked like?
Because our jaws positively dropped when Ellie crossed between two dilapidated structures—the ruins of Boston all around her and Massachusetts Bay in the distance—in a scene the ambitious HBO series borrowed from the award-winning 2013 video game.
Only, that was Bella Ramsey really on a plank, traversing a set built from the ground up to bring the haunting story about survival in a world destroyed by a zombifying fungus (and human tyranny) to life.
"She walked across that 2-by-6," production designer John Paino told E! News in an exclusive interview ahead of the show's March 12 season finale. "That was built in a parking lot. They're coming out of the museum, that roof is built, they're crossing that, and the other [wall] is built—obviously only six or eight feet off the ground."
The scenery beyond Ramsey is green screen, the three-time Emmy nominee noted, but everything the actors were walking on, riding through, climbing over, exploring, etc., throughout the show was the real deal, down to the last immersive detail.
You "could go up to a wall," Paino said, "and if you touched it, you might have slime all over you."
That authenticity was paramount as the crew set out to fulfill the vision of series creators Neil Druckmann (who also created the game) and Emmy winner Craig Mazin (a huge fan of the game, as were countless people who worked on the show).
"Knowing where Craig comes from with Chernobyl," Paino said, "he would have probably preferred to walk through and shoot actually in Chernobyl." So, they were always striving for "realism, making it look like 20 years of rain and neglect, plants growing through things. The game has a beautiful representation of it, but we also have to make it real, and also make it shootable."
Speaking to E! News on Zoom from his office, Paino detailed how they pulled it off: