The Last of Us episode 6 sees Pedro Pascal’s Joel finally reuniting with his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) after a difficult journey to find him in Wyoming. While the pair are clearly happy to see each other, they have a lot of history, which leads to a fraught scene in the commune’s bar between the pair.
Joel confronts Tommy for judging him over people they killed after Sarah’s death, as they reckon with the atrocities they both were involved in. However, Tommy star Luna has explained that they completely changed this emotional scene during a day of rehearsal before they shot it.
"In that session, Pedro and I completely rewrote the scene," Luna told Entertainment Weekly. "We didn't change a single letter. We just restructured the way that this scene unfolds. Craig being the mensch and the incredible artist that he is, he was like, 'This is better.' It made it feel right in terms of the way we hit each of these beats: how I eventually build the courage to stand up to [Joel] and tell him the truth and tell him what is an extremely joyful thing for me but potentially a very hurtful thing for him to hear, that I was gonna be a father.
"That was pretty much the only scene on the slate that whole day. It was just Pedro and I being brothers and doing what brothers do: laughing, joking, needling each other, and eventually fighting."
For more on the latest episode of The Last of Us, here are all the major changes from the games, the lowdown on those Part 2 Easter eggs, and why Joel’s medical condition is actually more canon than you might expect.
If you’re all up to date, here’s our breakdown of The Last of Us release schedule to make sure you don’t miss a moment of the HBO show.
