Pedro Pascal Breaks Silence On THAT The Last Of Us Shocker: 'I'm In Active Denial'

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

For fans of The Last Of Us looking for some comfort after Sunday night’s shocker… we give you the sweet, thoughtful Pedro Pascal.

The internet’s #1 zaddy is so unserious so much of the time. But this was enough to get him to open up about some raw emotion.

If you didn’t see, we recapped it HERE… But in short, Joel Miller met his violent end at the hands of new character Abby, the daughter of the doctor he murdered in Season 1. Devastatingly, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) arrived on the scene just in time to see him die. It was a scene that rocked gamers five years ago and HBO viewers all over again on Sunday night.

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In an interview with Entertainment Weekly published after the episode aired, he admitted he doesn’t “spend a lot of time thinking about” the show — a defense mechanism to keep from hurting over it:

“I’m in active denial. I realize this more and more as I get older, I find myself slipping into denial that anything is over.”

And it’s not fully over for him — and never will be:

“I know that I’m forever bonded to so many members of the experience and just have to see them under different circumstances but never will under the circumstances of playing Joel on The Last of Us.”

We will note, Pedro’s time on the show isn’t totally over either. The Last Of Us Part II‘s structure also jumps forward in time like the show — but fills in some of those gaps with a lot of Joel flashbacks, so he has a presence the entire game. The show also has a few great Pedro moments to come.

But still, he is gone — something he knew from the start as the second game was already out before they started making the show. But he didn’t know how hard it would be to leave when it came time:

“I was always sidestepping how I really felt, that in a big way my experience was coming to an end on the show. I guess that was the strangest thing to step through because I felt so bonded to everyone in the show after going through the gauntlet of Season 1 together, not just with Bella, but with the entire cast and crew.”

Pedro said it was a really “sad goodbye” in the end, not helped by wearing the gory prosthetics from getting killed:

“I had such a physical manifestation, a violent mirror of how sad it was for Joel to die. To be honest, it was quite dreamlike.”

Pedro and Bella told EW the same thing — the most heartbreaking moment of the episode for them was the moment Joel tries to get up when he sees Ellie. Pedro said emotionally:

“I have no idea if it’s captured on camera, but [there’s] a subtle sense that Joel can hear her in the last breath of life that he has left in him. He can hear her calling for him and hear that she’s in danger and wants to help her and is unable to lift even a finger to do so. I remember playing that, and that was really devastating.”

Oh, viewers got it. And it hit ’em hard. Social media has been a mess over the whole thing.

One more thing… Kaitlyn Dever, the actress who plays Abby, said it was really tough for her to watch, too — because she was a big fan of the games and the first season! So you know what Pedro did? HE HUGGED HER SO TIGHT! He still wanted to make her feel better! What a guy. Ch-ch-check out the sweet moments he shared with Bella AND Kaitlyn (below)!