The Last of Us Recruited Planet of the Apes Star to Help With Major Clicker Sequence

The Last of Us' fifth episode, "Endure and Survive," was released early this week because of the Super Bowl, and many fans are calling it the best episode of the series yet. It was a thrilling addition to the show and featured more "infected" than we've seen in the series so far. The scene features different types of infected, including "clickers," which are people who have been infected for at least one year, so the fungus has spread all over their bodies. You can also spot a "bloater," which is the most dangerous stage of the infected. Needless to say, they're all pretty darn terrifying. A new featurette was released by HBO Max after the episode aired, and revealed that the series got some help for the sequence from Terry Notary, a movement coach who has had roles in the Planet of the Apes movies as well as The Hobbit, Kong: Skull Island, and more. Most recently, he played the terrifying Gordy in Nope.

"When it came to the infected, we realized that we had the largest amount of infected that we've ever had in the show so far. So, we got in contact with Terry Notary, who does a lot of work with movement on the Planet of the Apes movies. He set up a special infected boot camp with stunt and movement people," director Jeremy Webb explained in the video. 

Notary added. "When you have a human being playing these characters, you really get the subtleties that is so hard for animators. It takes them forever to recreate it." You can check out the featurette below:

How Did The Last of Us Create the Bloater? 

While some visual effects were involved in creating the Bloater, the live-action version of the infected was largely practical, including a massive suit crafted by Barrie Gower. According to Gower, the suit weighed roughly 80 pounds, so they had to find the right-sized person to wear it. Game of Thrones stuntman Adam Basil, who is 6'6", ended up donning the suit. 

"We had a whole copy of his body that we modeled the bloater prosthetics over in modeling clay," Gower said in a recent chat with Variety. "We cast it out of a foam rubber and foam latex, which is very lightweight. It's almost like an upholstery foam, a very spongy sort of material. That was all molded and cast in separate sections: top half, head, arms, legs. We had a team who fabricated all these parts together. We had a zipper up the back and around the waist that we could zip them together. He had all these pendulous folds of fungus which hid zippers and poppers."

What did you think about the fifth episode of The Last of Us? Tell us in the comments!