The Last of Us star Gabriel Luna has opened up about what the casting process was like to portray the character Tommy in HBO’s latest TV series. Within the past day, The Last of Us finally premiered on HBO and was met with widespread acclaim from virtually all viewers. And while there many of the members of The Last of Us’ cast have expressed that they never played the original video game, Luna’s own history with the franchise goes back nearly a decade.
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In a conversation with ComicBook.com and ET’s The Last of Pods podcast, Luna opened up about how he eventually landed the role of Tommy in The Last of Us. Luna explained that he was already quite familiar with the original The Last of Us game, which made it a shock when co-writers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann made it clear that they wanted him to portray Tommy and star as Pedro Pascal’s brother in the show.
“Well, what I knew of Tommy at the onset was about 30 minutes of gameplay that I had back in 2013 when I was visiting Austin for Christmas,” Luna explained of his history with the game. “I was having a jam session with a bunch of my buddies and we were in between playing guitar, set it down, go sit on the couch. I rifled through all of his games and he had The Last of Us. I threw that in and it was surprising to me that the whole first 30 minutes of the game took place in Austin. I thought that that was really, really cool.”
“I played it. Then, never did play it again until 10 years later when I was, I guess, back in ’21 when we were gearing up to do the show. I was told that [Craig] Mazin and Neil [Druckmann] thought of me for the role and thought I might be good, I might fit as Pedro’s brother, and that there was some interest there,” he went on to say. “I bought the game and started playing immediately, because I didn’t want to take a meeting with Mazin and not know what they were talking about. […] Once I got there and talked to Neil, talked to Craig, and of course, I didn’t want to take a meeting with Neil and just not really know anything about it, which apparently wasn’t cause for concern or a reason to worry because they were telling everyone else not to play. I was happy to be on my own little Last of Us boat for two and a half months and discovering the characters, discovering who Tommy was, realizing how many similarities there were. All it did was build my anticipation for day one, just to finally get the chance to step into those boots.”
While Luna plays a key role in the pilot of The Last of Us, his character is eventually written out roughly halfway into the episode, which means that we don’t yet know when he may show back up. Based on HBO’s own preview trailer of The Last of Us, Luna’s version of Tommy will reappear at some point further in the season, but when and how that might come about remains to be seen.
The Last of Us airs each Sunday at 9:00pm ET/6:00pm PT on HBO and HBO Max. The show’s first season is set to last nine episodes in total.
