Nico Parker (‘The Last of Us’) on Sarah’s ‘intense’ scenes: ‘Your body knows that you’re faking it, but your brain doesn’t’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Nico Parker is not a gamer. But she often liked to pass the time by watching YouTube videos of gamers playing through Naughty Dog’s cinematic gaming masterpiece, “The Last of Us.” She was particularly drawn to watching people play through the opening sequence, told from the perspective of the sweet but doomed Sarah, including “reaction videos” of teenagers crying over the character’s fate. So it was a bit of kismet that Parker wound up nabbing the role of Sarah in HBO’s TV adaptation of “The Last of Us.” She stopped binging these videos as soon as she won the part, however, “to stay away so I could have my own interpretation of the character,” according to the actress. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
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There are aspects of Sarah which Parker sees in herself. “There’s an optimism… and a kind of bouncy nature to her,” she explains, “I think I’m predominantly a positive person.” This point of connection helped the actress relate to Sarah and find her own unique way to portray Sarah’s expanded story in the first episode. Her kind heart and positivity also balances out her father Joel (Pedro Pascal), who Parker describes as “a glass half empty kind of guy.”
Joel may be a pessimist, but Parker had a lovely time working with Pascal. “How amazing is it that we get to live in a time where Pedro Pascal is ruling the world?” she quips. The pair built up a rapport for about two weeks before they filmed together, though that is still a brief amount of time in which to construct a believable father and daughter bond. But the short timeframe didn’t matter to the actress. “We just immediately got on really well, so it didn’t feel like work,” she reveals.
SEE Is Pedro Pascal’s Emmy search finally over thanks to HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’?
The closeness of these actors serves the emotional impact of Sarah’s abrupt death scene in the middle of the episode. Parker describes filming that moment as “intense,” especially when contrasting the quietness of the scene with the action sequence which preceded it. When the chaos dies down, the pressure falls to the actors, rather than any special effects. “Your body knows that you’re faking it, but your brain doesn’t,” explains Parker, who admits that she and Pascal even had to FaceTime each other the morning after the scene to decompress. “I was so proud to have done it after it was done,” she states. She had many preconceived notions of how she would perform the scene ahead of time, “but then you get there and it’s just sort of all out the window,” she notes, due to the intensity of the moment. “It was cathartic.”
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