This week’s episode of HBO’s The Last of Us landed a treat, introducing one of the show’s central antagonists in David (Scott Shepherd) and pushing Bella Ramsey to her limits, both on-screen and off-screen. Isn’t it ironic that Ellie fends off Infected for the entirety of the season, yet she meets her match in another human being, and not one zombified by the fungi ravaging the world?
Ellie and David’s standoff amps up the intensity, especially as it’s implied that David has taken a certain… liking to Ellie (it gives us the creeps just thinking about it). But what makes that scene all the more interesting is the fact that Ramsey’s on-set difficulties were translated through to her character to add a certain element of realism to a nail-biting interaction.
For our benefit, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann attend weekly recordings of HBO’s The Last of Us Podcast, hosted by Joel’s original voice and motion capture actor, Troy Baker. For this segment, all eyes were on Bella Ramsey, who delivers one of the greatest performances of her career.
As Mazin describes below, when David and Ellie first meet, the latter points a rifle at the former, who yields only to make Ellie falsely believe she has all the power. In those shots, Ramsey was carrying a real rifle (all live rounds and blanks taken out, so it was unloaded), which a majority of the population will know to be extremely heavy, presuming they’ve ever handled one.
“The gun as she’s walking around is unloaded, but it’s a real rifle and it is heavy. And Bella, the next day, was feeling it in her biceps and her pecs. It was hard for her to hold that thing up and we would — throughout the scene where she confronts [David] — from off-camera, we would occasionally be like “Lift the gun, Lift the gun,” because she would – it starts to lower, but she can’t lower it, she has to keep it on [David], and yet you can see her struggling with it. And we kept some of those moments in, they’re subtle, but you can tell. She’s just not equipped and yet she’s trying her best.”
Although it might have been uncomfortable and exhausting for Ramsey to film, it turned out that her difficulty with brandishing the firearm couldn’t have been more appropriate to Ellie’s predicament, where she finds herself facing not one but two strangers with nothing more than her wits and the persuasion of a rifle pointed between their eyes. Understandably, she’s afraid, and although Ramsey wasn’t shaking in her boots in Scott Shepherd’s presence, it certainly appears that way on-screen — and it works wonders.