Warning: This article contains spoilers fromThe Last of Usepisodes 4 and 5.
Jeffrey Pierceremembers when Screen Gems assembled a troupe of actors for a table read.
By his own recollection, he was the only cast member from the games to attend.
Jeffrey Pierce plays Perry in HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’.Liane Hentscher/HBO
He won’t say which other actors were present, even now.
“In a two-hour runtime, how are you gonna tell 14, 17 hours of story?
Pierce and his fellow actors delivered motion-capture performances for the video games.
Jeffrey Pierce as Perry and Melanie Lynskey as Kathleen in ‘The Last of Us’.Liane Hentscher/HBO
“So how would that become special?”
“It’s a dramatic genetic connection between the game and the show,” he explains.
“They needed to be there.”
“But I emailed [Druckmann] early on and said, ‘Look, man.
Pierce originally read for a different part.
He won’t say which part, only that it was more like a victim.
Pierce, admittedly, hates talking about “acting.”
He never wanted to over intellectualize his approach to Perry.
Perry’s death was just as satisfying to Pierce as Perry’s life.
He grabs a hold of him and rips him apart with bare hands.
It’s just what a Bloater would do if it ever caught up to the player in the game.
Pierce remembers a few different ideas were thrown around for Perry’s death scene.
The actor knows Perry goes out with “a really, really terrible self-sacrifice.”
The guy throws himself in front of the monster so Kathleen can get away and is immediately done in.
Pierce met Luna and feels “he is so well suited to the role.”
“His approach was everything that I would’ve hoped,” he says.
I couldn’t ask to be better honored for what I did.
It’s really gratifying to see it done so well.”
