Gabriel Luna is a veteran actor on film and TV. His big break should have been for Terminator: Dark Fate (more on that film later), but that film underperformed with both critics (not this critic) and at the box office. Persistence does pay off, though. Proof positive is Gabriel’s casting as ‘Tommy,’ Joel’s brother (Pedro Pascal) on The Last of Us. Gabriel’s terrific work serves as a counterweight to Pedro’s performance. He is warmer, less damaged, and a consensus builder at the Jackson, Wyoming commune. Gabriel provides a degree of balance on the lauded series.
In our conversation, we discussed Tommy’s Yin to Pedro’s Yang, Pedro’s exit, responsibility, and masculinity.
The Contending: What is it like to work on a show where any episode could be your last?
Gabriel Luna: That’s a loaded question. (Laughs). It’s really clever the way you phrase that because you can extract a lot of information from an answer to that question. That is a possibility. Knowing what I know about the source material, I don’t know if I carry that feeling around too much, but I do like the idea that the audience feels that way. One example I’m most proud of is in the second episode, where we have the big action, the invasion, and the monsters come to Jackson. So many folks would tell me how they thought that Tommy was going to bite the dust, and I was like, great, that’s what I hope you would feel. I hope that people felt the impending doom and the imminent danger of that whole situation, and that’s just the real world. Some of us aren’t immune to death like heroes are in the films we watch. None of us are immune to death. That’s a huge factor in the appeal of our show, that kind of sense of reality and the truth of our mortality. I think it’s great. It’s great for the show, and it’s great for the audience to never fully feel like you have your feet, for there always to be the possibility for you to be carried off into a completely new and different world in our story. With the departure of certain characters, you find yourself in a different world.
The Contending: Any show that is based on previous material, whether it’s a video game in this case, a book, or a remake may not be beholden to that source material, but it is trying to serve potentially more than one audience: the folks that came to the show because of the source material and the folks that came to the show just because they were interested and never picked up a video game controller in their lives. What is the sense of responsibility there? There are deviations from the video game, but there is also a certain amount of adherence to it.
Gabriel Luna: There is a concerted effort to be as faithful as possible, right down to the framing in some of the scenes. There’s also a desire to evolve the story to take the opportunity to explore different ways of telling certain moments. I can imagine for the creator, Neil (Druckmann), who spent so many years working on the story, that it wouldn’t serve him, and it wouldn’t make him feel like he was exerting his powers as a storyteller just to do it again. That’s probably one of the more exciting aspects of this job: the opportunity to have a redo in certain moments and approach it in a different way.
We want to serve the story as it is. We want to honor the things that the fans of the game love. We also want to give them new and exciting things to explore, different parts of the characters that they didn’t engage with when they were locked into this first-person immersive experience as they’re moving through it. And then for the new audience, who have only experienced it via live action, it’s a true test of how universal the tale is and how compelling the characters are. While we do try to expand the story in the areas where we want to expand it, it is a test of how strong the source material is, because we do rely heavily on it. Does it translate? It turns out that it does, really well, and people care about Ellie and they care about Joel, Tommy, and his family. That’s the crux of the story. That’s the only way it works: you actually feel like they’re real people that you could sacrifice your life for.
The Contending: It’s also a test of the ensemble. Pedro Pascal departing the show—I remember thinking I knew this was supposed to happen, based upon the lore of the game, but I was also thinking, are they really going to do that? When you pull up HBO, the first thing you see is a big photograph of Pedro. It asks the ensemble to lift the show, which is a heavy ask.
Gabriel Luna: With the departure of certain characters, you find yourself in different worlds. Just as in life, certain pillars of your family, if they were to pass away, the family dynamics shift. What certain people are responsible for, when and why they are responsible for certain things at what times, all of those are changing. It was very sudden for the people who played the game. It was a hotly debated aspect of that second game, to the point where Neil and the creators of the game got a lot of really horrible threats. That’s just how passionate people were, and people still are. Maybe there would be the incentive to take a different approach, try to soften that blow a bit, but that wouldn’t be true to the story. That wouldn’t be true to life as a human. We don’t get to choose.
We don’t get to make things more palatable or digestible. People that we love the most suffer these horrible tragedies. This death is important to the story. It’s the inciting incident for the second game, and for the subsequent chapters of our story, what that does to everyone’s psyche and how it rearranges and completely redraws their trajectory. In both the story and in real life, there was a shift. There was a shift in leadership, a transition to Bella’s stewardship, and Kaitlyn, Rutina, and I, and the people who would be taking the story and running with it. There’s still so much of that character, and the spirit of Joel is still very much in the character that Bella is playing, and it will continue to be. That’s a more accurate way of approaching that idea of loss and grief; it’s something to be carried, something to be preserved, defended, and avenged. So, while the character’s gone, the idea of him and the influence of him is still very much there, and it’s up to the rest of us to carry that forward.
The Contending: The Last of Us is a show about making every moment count. In your case, with you playing Tommy, who is brother to Pedro’s Joel, it occurred to me how precious few scenes you had with Pedro that were on screen, and you have to make a connection and create chemistry quickly. You’re the counterpart to Joel. Joel’s got a more nihilistic outlook on the world, and you are hopeful, but a little sad, which fits.
Gabriel Luna: In the first season, Pedro and I spent some time together, and it just clicked naturally. We did some fun family outings, he, myself, and Nico, who played Sarah, his daughter/my niece. We had the pilot, which is when the world ends, and we spent a lot of time in a truck together listening to music and talking. Then, in the sixth episode, Joel and Ellie arrive in Jackson. We try to fold them into our community, into our family, but we’re still a little bit cagey trying to feel each other out. Who is this person sitting in front of me? Because the timeline is maybe seven/eight years that we’d been separated, there’s a desire to forge this kind of bond, which we did with a lot of the physicality and the dialect. Pedro asked me to read this passage from Blood Meridian so that he could hear my voice and vice versa. We worked a lot on the physicality of it all. We had this wonderful rehearsal period with Jasmila (Zbanic) when we did the bar scene last season. A lot of that was brewed and created offscreen, and then the writing is just so good. I love all the family moments. They’re brief, but they’re all very impactful.
The way the characters are written and the way that we talk about each other informs so much about the relationship, based on this shared history and the context as it all plays out. You have these little inside jokes that contractors tell. We have our constructor dialogue. There’s a moment when Ellie burns her arm in one of the flashbacks, and Joel’s like, ‘Who let this happen?’ And there I am, the little brother—still a little brother, a 50-something year old man—but ‘What do you mean ‘let’?’ This wasn’t on me. I was eating my dinner, and she did this. I think there’s just so much to those moments that create decades of history. And I’m told that we resemble each other in a way, especially when we both have facial hair, that helps sell it. It is a really interesting relationship in different explorations of masculinity. I always use this analogy that Tommy is both lion and lamb, and I think that both of those characters have that. It’s a matter of where the slider is going at any time. I think Tommy is forced to be a little bit more balanced in that way. Joel, with all the grief and pain he’s experienced, sometimes tilts off to try to protect himself and those he loves and protect his own softness within, and leans towards a little bit more of a hardened person. They both share many of the same characteristics. Pedro was great to work with. A lot of times, it just happened in the scene. He’s a very observant person, stays alive in it, and we don’t have to do a whole bunch of pre-visioning of the thing; we just let it be.
The Contending: What’s different about Tommy is that he’s the leader of a commune. That puts him in a different position than Joel is in, where Joel can exist in this little pact with Bella, and everything else around that is something else. As a leader, you have to bring factions together, which we see a lot on the show, in terms of managing the town. You and Rutina are on what I guess you would call the board. Does that track for you? The idea of playing leadership, and I should also ask about working with Rutina.
Gabriel Luna: You’re right. That’s the position that they’ve been elected into, and it’s one that Tommy is not used to. I don’t think he’s ever been a lone wolf in the way that Joel is, but he certainly enjoyed living without too many encumbrances on his free will and what he wanted to do. Once he got to Jackson, they took him in, and he fell in love, and now they have this beautiful family, and his brother is back, and his brother has brought Ellie, who’s someone that Tommy loves and cares for, and sees the renewal that she’s brought to his brother. However wide this chasm that they are experiencing at the beginning of the season is, he still knows that they are one in so many ways.
And so he has to be all of that: be a father, be a board member, security council leader, the tether that binds his family—his brother to his wife, his son to his brother, his surrogate niece to his brother, and that divide that they’re experiencing. Tommy’s trying to be the glue that holds everything together. It’s a noble effort, but I think it’s misguided to think that he could do it all. It’s one of the more beautiful aspects of that character, him rising to meet the requirements of his duty in whatever shape that takes. And so I love that about him. I love that idea and what that version of masculinity is. The usefulness of Tommy and the strength of him being funneled towards others, and the protection of others, and the protection of the sacred things, and the things that he kind of holds most dear.
The Contending: It’s a leap of faith, isn’t it, to put one foot in front of the other when you are in the apocalypse? That’s the thing that’s admirable about Tommy. You can see behind his eyes that there’s a realism, a sadness, but also, if we don’t do this, what are we even doing?
Gabriel Luna: That’s it. He’s a forward-thinking person, only forward. Even if it means down, forward is the direction we must go. Joel is haunted by events of his past and continually reaches back and tries to bring back things that are gone. That’s where they start to deviate, those two characters, and their perspectives and their philosophies on what’s important at this point in the world. If not for the people, what is the point? Tommy is very much of a “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” type of person. He’s about moving forward together. And I love Rutina. That is an absolute blessing to have been able to work with her and to have her play my wife, because it was easy to fall in love with Rutina Wesley. It also helped that I had a bit of a crush on her character in True Blood for a while. She’s terrific. She’s just so good. And we had a lot of fun, both on and off set, just going and having meals together and brunches and talking about music and family and pets and all kinds of things. She’s just a good egg, and I’m happy to share the screen with her as often as I can.
The Contending: My last question is a simple one, and I’ll end it with a lighthearted note: you can’t tell me anything, can you?
Gabriel Luna: Yeah, no. (Laughs). You have carte blanche to ask whatever you want about Season two. I’ll tell you everything about it, but I’d be blowing smoke to tell you that I knew exactly how we’re going to approach the story moving forward. I know what I know about the source material, but I also know that Craig and Neil are very creative and exciting showrunners and directors. I’ve got questions for them, and I’m excited to find out the answers to those questions.
The Contending: Can I just get out of here by saying Dark Fate is a terribly underrated Terminator movie? It’s the third-best movie in that series of films. Why didn’t more people see it? It was worth it just for the sequence on the freeway alone, but it does have a thickness of heart and a value to it that I think if it would have been the third film, truly the third Terminator film instead of the ones that came in between, I think it would’ve done much better.
Gabriel Luna: I think it was about three months after it came out, the pandemic happened. It was just unfortunate timing. It is still something very dear to my heart. So many folks have shared the same sentiment you have, and that was what we were hoping for. Jim Cameron wanted to make a true sequel to Terminator 2, and this is what came out. Tim (Miller) did a great job as director, and I loved it. I love Arnold and I’ve worked with him three times now. Good things come from all directions, and, once again, just like Tommy, you’ve just got to keep moving forward and take all the good with you.
