Warning: Spoilers for The Last of Us to follow.
Saving the best for last is a common practice among many different endeavors, but The Last of Us continues to prove that it has the best of most everything in marked surplus. That was the case last week, it was the case the week before that, and with the penultimate episode “When We Are in Need” having graced us, the sentiment is perhaps truer than ever right now.
Among the episode’s many high points was the return of Troy Baker, the original actor behind Joel in The Last of Us video games, who this time found himself in the shoes of James, an antagonistic settler whose reprehensible eating habits don’t even place him at the top at the list of this episode’s most wicked characters. Indeed, the man we cheered for back in the games certainly made audiences pull a 180 in that department with an eye-catchingly chilling performance.
Baker’s latest turn didn’t come without a deep dive into the material, either. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the actor broke down his process for constructing villain characters, and how that process worked itself into James’ characterization, which, perhaps unsurprisingly given Baker’s intimate connection to the IP, wound up being similar to Joel.
“I like playing baddies. I think that they’re pretty complex. The first challenge becomes, how is this person not a villain? To me, James is not. James is a pragmatist. Just look at Joel in the very beginning. Joel was not a bad guy. Joel would never be a ruthless survivor. He was a contractor. He may have gotten in a tussle every now and then, but he was a good guy. What happens when you take a good person and put them through the most desperate of circumstances is you get a ruthless survivor, you get a black market smuggler that’s capable of horrific things. James is the same way.”
Indeed, the Cordyceps apocalypse certainly brought out the worst in many people, and James is no exception. Of course, everyone has a ceiling on how far they’ll let their morals slip away in times of duress, and let’s just say that that can be the real key factor when it comes down to how we feel about a character, as was the case for James and his infinitely more detestable partner, David.