‘The Last of Us’ video game star reflects on watching Pedro Pascal bring Joel to life in front of his eyes

Warning: Spoilers for The Last of Us to follow.

The eighth episode of The Last of Us was many things; evocative, scary, ultimately alleviating in an emotional sense, and the site of perhaps one of the best performances we’ll ever see in Bella Ramsey’s young career.

It also had the distinct honor of uniting two generations of Joels, even if they ultimately didn’t share any screentime together. Troy Baker – the original actor behind protagonist Joel Miller in the original games – made his grand return to the IP, this time in the form of James, a settler and enemy to Joel and Ellie. He may not have been given the reigns for the most tasteful character, relatively speaking, but Baker sold it magnificently, and he’s all too happy to be involved nevertheless.

In fact, Baker seems to be in full admiration of Pedro Pascal and his success with charting new waters for the character that Baker first brought to life a decade ago. In an interview with Variety, Baker incisively broke down Pascal’s approach to Joel, making a special note of how the actor’s subtleties leave the biggest impact.

“He does this thing where he’s so confident in his grasp on the character that it allows him to just sit comfortably in his own conviction. He does everything on a knife’s edge. There’s nothing that’s wild. If you watch all of his choices, there’s so minimal, and because of that, they’re profound. And it makes Joel, in a lot of ways, more dangerous.”

He would go on to note how Pascal’s performance makes full use of the opportunities afforded to him by the television medium, many of which weren’t available to Baker in the video game.

“There’s a physicality that he brought to this that we couldn’t have done in the game. When you’re stitching yourself up from bullets and shivs, you can’t go, “Ow, my hand still hurts.” But then in the show, we could say “I broke my hand and it’s bruised,” and it stays with him for months. That, to me, is something that helps to ground the story and present it in a very tangible way to a whole new audience.”

It looks like the torch has been passed, and subsequently inflamed like never before. Baker may be the OG, but Pascal looks primed to cement himself as the true-to-type Joel Miller, and it seems that everyone is happy to get behind such a sentiment.