With filming now officially underway on HBO’s The Last of Us series, executive producer and co-writer Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) has revealed the episode count for the first season.
During an appearance on the Scriptnotes podcast, Mazin revealed that the first season will have “five directors across 10 episodes” and that “the writing for the first three episodes, and to some extent the first four episodes, is kinda done.”
So far, three of the five directors have been announced including Jasmila Žbanić, Ali Abbasi, and Kantemir Balagov who will helm episodes from a script by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the writer and creative director of the game series. Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) will play Joel and Ellie respectively with Gabriel Luna set to play Joel’s brother, Tommy, Merle Dandridge reprising her video game role as Marlene, and Nico Parker (The Third Day) set to portray Joel’s daughter, Sarah.
The Last of Us is “set 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed and centres on the relationship between Joel, a smuggler in this new world, and Ellie, a teenager who may be key to a cure for a deadly pandemic. Joel, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle the 14-year-old girl out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey as they traverse the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.”
