Why Joel Had To Die In The Last Of Us, According To Co-Creator Neil Druckmann

This article contains spoilers for "The Price," the penultimate episode of season 2 of "The Last of Us." Stop reading right now if you haven't watched it — spoilers lie ahead!

It feels impossible to imagine a world where Joel Miller, the original protagonist of the 2013 video game "The Last of Us" and the 2023 HBO television adaptation (played by Troy Miller and Pedro Pascal, respectively), is still alive. What I mean by this is that, in both the game and show, Joel sort of has to die to drive the narrative for his surrogate daughter Ellie, portrayed by Ashley Johnson in the original games and Bella Ramsey in the show. According to game creator and co-showrunner Neil Druckmann, though, there is a world where Joel maybe survives. However, as he explained to Alan Sepinwall for Rolling Stone, he and his co-showrunner Craig Mazin ultimately decided against Joel surviving a vengeful attack from Abby Anderson (Kaitlyn Dever).

"Yes, because we discuss everything," Druckmann told Sepinwall when the latter asked if they considered saving both Abby and Joel's death for a later season. "We even discussed what if we didn't kill Joel, just to interrogate it. Because everything should be on the table. Everything should be interrogated to make sure we're making the best choices for this version of the story. We even discussed, could we tell this other story, could we prolong this moment? But the more we discussed it, the more it just felt wrong. It felt like we would only be doing it for business reasons, to maintain this feeling that people have for longer. But there wasn't a story there to motivate it. The inciting incident, the origin of this story is Joel's death. Any inciting incident, you have to get to it as soon as possible. What motivates this entire journey that Ellie goes on starts with Joel."

So, as Sepinwall asked, what came out of a discussion about not killing Joel? Did Druckmann recall any specifics? "I don't, because that was a very short conversation that didn't have any impact on us," Druckmann clarified. "Because we knew we were exploring something that, you know, we're not going to get much out of this, and we didn't."

Neil Druckmann stepped into the director's chair for "The Price" — marking his second time doing so on "The Last of Us" after the season 1 episode "The Infected" — and as he told Alan Sepinwall, the show's creatives did not shoot any of Joel's flashback scenes before filming his on-screen death, meaning that Pedro Pascal did have to return to the set of the series to reprise his role one last time. "We shot out Pedro for episode [2], then he went to work on a different project," Druckmann revealed. When Sepinwall asked if it felt different when Pascal came back, his answer was measured:

"Yes, although in the day-to-day, you wouldn't feel it. But definitely, as we were getting closer to the end, you could feel this parting of the ways coming. And then the last day, specifically, it got really emotional when we finished the last shot and we hung out for a while and just hugged it out and chatted and reminisced."

Not only that, but Druckmann also knew full well that the final go-around with Joel and Ellie in the television series — who are portrayed so beautifully by both Pascal and Bella Ramsey, two actors with apparent and obvious real-life chemistry and a sweet relationship as well — would be really difficult, because of the work they'd already put into their roles. "I knew because of their chemistry, because of what they brought, how painful this would be," Druckmann said, speaking to the fact that Pascal's Joel and Ramsey's Ellie have won over audiences across the world.

"And it needed to be painful to tell this story," he continued. "If they didn't have chemistry, I would have been worried about how we tell this story. So for me, it was more of a question of, that story can be complete, that story can live on its own. That's how we made the first game. But we put in certain changes and tweaks prepping for the next story if we got the chance to tell it. And luckily, the show was successful to such a degree that HBO was, with open arms, excited to have us continue to tell the story."

Obviously, Joel does die (at Abby's hands in season 2, episode 2, "Through the Valley"), and that's why we only see him via flashback in "The Price," living through several of Ellie's previous birthdays and charting the ups and downs of their relationship. Neil Druckmann said that filming this episode with both Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey was always intense, particularly because of the real-life affection between the two and their shared understanding of Joel and Ellie (and their relationship).

"It's such a joy. They're so talented," Druckmann gushed. "They now understand these characters so much. I'm in such a unique position, because I've lived with these characters and these scenes for so long, and to get to revisit them in these scenes that mean so much to fans, but also to me personally ... I was very nervous. I wanted to make sure I did it justice for not only the show, but just 'The Last of Us' as a whole, and what the gamers are going to expect from these sequences coming off the game. In the moment, I was so pleasantly surprised by what they were putting in front of the camera."

Plus, as Druckmann pointed out, working outside of motion-capture — which was used for the "Last of Us" games — allowed for a certain level of emotionality. "There's certain moments in live-action where you have happy accidents, like you can't plan for something," he said before revealing a touching moment between Ramsey and Pascal that happened organically in a scene where Joel brings Ellie to an abandoned space museum for her birthday. "When they're in the space capsule, and Joel is asking Ellie how he did, and then you see he has this just beautiful smile on his face, and he turns, and you see the glint of a tear in his wrinkles. You don't see him cry; just that. We couldn't plan for that, and the fact that we caught it, I'm like, it's just ... you just catch these beautiful moments that are just there, and then they're gone. That is the beauty of live-action."

The season 2 finale of "The Last of Us" airs on May 25, 2025, at 9 P.M. on HBO Max and HBO.