Pedro Pascal is currently headlining two beloved franchises in pop culture through Disney’s The Mandalorian and HBO’s The Last of Us, but how do the renegade bounty hunter from the galaxy far, far away and the dad-turned-fighter Joel Miller from the modern-day apocalypse stack up against each other?
Pascal was recently asked in an interview with GQ Magazine if the upcoming HBO live-action adaptation of The Last of Us would remain loyal to the universally acclaimed video games. In response, the actor compared the project to what Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are doing with The Mandalorian.
“There’s a very, very creative way of honoring what’s important and also preserving what is iconic to the experience of the video game, and also [to include] things that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. And then directions that you would expect it to go, and it might not… they’re doing some really smart things, is all I can say. It’s similar to the way Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni treat The Mandalorian, in how [Mazin and Druckmann] are treating The Last of Us — it’s in good hands because they love it so much. Well, clearly Neil created the video game, but Craig loves it so much. So it really is made for the people that love it. And there’s some very intense storytelling for people who might be less familiar.”
You wouldn’t be able to draw a lot of parallels between The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, but one thing that could definitely be said of the former is that it managed to reignite interest in Star Wars after Disney dropped the ball with their sequel trilogy.
In that sense, let’s hope that Druckmann and the rest of the producers working on this live-action manage the same by winning fans over when The Last of Us premieres sometime in 2023.
