The Last of Us alum Jeffrey Pierce on scrapped movie and his 'Kurosawa ronin' character Perry
Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Last of Us episodes 4 and 5.
Jeffrey Pierce remembers when Screen Gems assembled a troupe of actors for a table read. The studio was developing a movie adaptation of The Last of Us with Neil Druckmann, one of the co-creators of the highly popular and critically acclaimed video game of the same name.
Pierce, who had voiced the role of Joel's brother Tommy, was asked to read the same part for the read-through. By his own recollection, he was the only cast member from the games to attend. He won't say which other actors were present, even now. It was that secretive.
Druckmann has spoken about the years of effort to adapt The Last of Us, the soul-stirring saga of Joel, a hardened survivor enduring a world now irrevocably changed by a zombie-spawning fungal brain infection, and Ellie, the young girl immune to the virus that he must ferry across the country.
"As good as it was, it was never gonna be a great movie," Pierce tells EW of that early movie treatment. "In a two-hour runtime, how are you gonna tell 14, 17 hours of story? Then I think that there was some conversation about it maybe being an animation motion-capture movie series at some point, and that seemed like a good idea, but we've been down that road."
Liane Hentscher/HBO Jeffrey Pierce plays Perry in HBO's 'The Last of Us'
Pierce and his fellow actors delivered motion-capture performances for the video games. "So how would that become special?" he continues. "The second that I heard that Neil and Craig had lunch together — I had just watched Chernobyl in a hotel room in Vancouver or something and was floored by this historical event — I knew that the two of them were gonna make something just about perfect."
Four episodes into HBO's The Last of Us, created by Druckmann and Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin, Pierce debuts as a fresh character newly made for the series adaptation. Perry is the right-hand henchman of Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), the leader of a movement that rose up against the oppressive military operation in Kansas City and took back the metropolis. Mazin says fan service had nothing to do with bringing back actors like Pierce who helped breathe life into the original characters for the drama. "It's a dramatic genetic connection between the game and the show," he explains. "They needed to be there."
"I knew that Tommy was not gonna be something that I was gonna play in this go round," Pierce remarks, alluding to the fact that he's older than the character he voiced a decade ago. "But I emailed [Druckmann] early on and said, 'Look, man. If there's anything that I can do to help support this story, if there's something that I can come in and create that's different from Tommy or that stands in the back and carries a f---ing spear, I'll be there in a heartbeat because I wanna support this thing that we've been a part of for so long."
Pierce originally read for a different part. He won't say which part, only that it was more like a victim. He won't say which actor got the job, either, because he doesn't want to cast any wrong wrong on the guy who did play the role. "Ultimately, I got the kind of feedback that you want, which was, 'Look, you're great, but we're never gonna believe you as a victim.' I'm like, 'Well, that's not quite what I broadcast or carry with me,' and I'm glad of that."
About a week later, Druckmann called up Pierce with the opportunity to play Perry, who features in two episodes on The Last of Us. Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) arrive in Kansas City on their way to Wyoming. They become embroiled in Kathleen and Perry's city-wide manhunt for Henry (Lamar Johnson), who had ratted out Kathleen's brother to the militia in the old regime.
Liane Hentscher/HBO Jeffrey Pierce as Perry and Melanie Lynskey as Kathleen in 'The Last of Us'
Besides "don't cut your hair" and "let your beard grow," Pierce said he received two pieces of information for Perry. "The first one was that he carries himself maybe like he's ex-military, I think is what Craig wrote in the script," Pierce recalls. "And then later when things go to shit, it's like there's a switch that's been flipped and Perry is handling himself like a professional. So they kind of left me to draw my own conclusions about who this guy was and the course of his life and what led him to where he is."
Pierce, admittedly, hates talking about "acting." He never wanted to over intellectualize his approach to Perry. But he came to think of him as "a Kurosawa ronin who came to Kansas City and re-found his purpose and dedicated his life and his love to Kathleen and to her brother."
Perry's death was just as satisfying to Pierce as Perry's life. He gets a classic video game demise: as swarms of Infected rise from a sinkhole in the ground, a Bloater, that giant sucker, charges Perry. He grabs a hold of him and rips him apart with bare hands. It's just what a Bloater would do if it ever caught up to the player in the game.
Pierce remembers a few different ideas were thrown around for Perry's death scene. "Ultimately, they went back to the games in terms of wanting it to be that maw pop," he says.
The actor knows Perry goes out with "a really, really terrible self-sacrifice." The guy throws himself in front of the monster so Kathleen can get away and is immediately done in. And yet, he sees it as "a wonderful ending for that particular character, for a man who lived a life of honor based on his understanding of the world."
With the arrival of episode 6, viewers will get to see the return of Tommy, played on the series by Gabriel Luna. Pierce met Luna and feels "he is so well suited to the role."
"His approach was everything that I would've hoped," he says. "The care that he took to treat it like a biopic, to approach Tommy as a real person and then bring all of himself to it, as well. I couldn't ask to be better honored for what I did. It's really gratifying to see it done so well."
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