The Last of Us actor on filming the Infected swarm and going out in a blaze of glory
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Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Last of Us season 1, episode 5.
This week on HBO's The Last of Us — you guessed it — more death! Certain ones, however, were less emotionally devastating than usual.
A climactic sequence left mass casualties towards the end of episode 5 when viewers finally learned what Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) and Perry (Jeffrey Pierce) have been trying to keep quiet. As the "war criminal" continued her rampage in pursuit of Henry (Lamar Johnson), we learn FEDRA soldiers in Kansas City drove the Infected down into the tunnels beneath the metropolis before Kathleen's forces took back the QZ. That's why Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) barely find any wandering the streets.
The hordes of fungi mutants finally explode out of the earth at the moment Kathleen has her prey cornered in a cul-de-sac.
HBO The Infected explode from the ground in 'The Last of Us' episode 5.
The warlord herself met her end at the hands of a particularly creepy Infected — a little girl who became a Clicker. Skye Belle Cowton, a self-described "rhythmic gymnast" from Canada, was the child stunt performer behind this monster, which launches itself at Kathleen to beat her to death.
"It was crazy. She was so not afraid," Lynskey tells EW. "She's on a wire swinging through the air and she's just like, 'Great!' in the middle of the night in her little Blue's Clues t-shirt."
According to Lynskey, Craig Mazin, her friend and a showrunner on The Last of Us with Neil Druckmann, directed her through an ADR session to record Kathleen's final gurgles. "He wanted it to sound like someone was ripping your throat out," she says with a laugh. "It's so awful, but that's how specific he is."
HBO "Rhythmic gymnast" Skye Belle Cowton played the creepy Clicker in 'The Last of Us' episode 5.
Lynskey isn't sad to have been killed off so quickly because she's still in awe of the scale of the production for this big Infected bonanza, which included hundreds of people — including other "circus performers," as the actress puts it — enduring hours of make-up to become the Infected.
"I've never been so astounded in my life at what I saw around me," she says. "They built that cul-de-sac. They just built it next to a studio. It's huge and there are houses and you could walk into the houses because the set designer and the art director and production designer wanted it to be where you could use any space if you needed to. The level of detail was just crazy. You could have done a close-up on anything and it would've been absolutely perfect. There's no fudging. So even just to see that was so insane."
The sequence also marked Lynskey's first time meeting series star Pascal. Up until then, she and Pierce, playing Kathleen's right hand, had been off shooting their separate storyline. It's only when Kathleen has Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam at gunpoint that the actors are all on camera together.
Liane Hentscher/HBO Jeffrey Pierce as Perry and Melanie Lynskey as Kathleen in 'The Last of Us'
"It was my last day of work," Lynskey recalls. "I think he literally had been gone on a press tour for the movie that he did with Nicolas Cage [The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent]. So he wasn't even there and I was just like, 'Oh, this is your show. Hi!' It was just us off doing our own thing."
The actress agrees the Infected blowout was her most difficult sequence to pull off, mainly because of the cold. Up north in Calgary, Canada, in the dead of winter isn't exactly a luxurious time of year.
Lynskey notes, "Everyone was making sure we were warm enough and making sure all the stunt performers and background people were warm enough, which is something that I'm always very concerned with."
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