The Last of Us Season 2 ends with a fiery shootout in what should be a place of joy. The second season of the HBO show crescendos with Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) discovering where Ellie (Bella Ramsey) has been hiding with friends Dina (Isabela Merced), Jesse (Young Mazino), and Tommy (Gabriel Luna): a local Seattle theater. Shots are fired. At least one of our heroes is killed. A place of music and art and sanctuary has become the latest Last of Us slaughterhouse.
That said, the cast and the crew of The Last of Us managed to make the most of the location before filming Season 2’s final, harrowing sequence. The Last of Us star Gabriel Luna revealed to DECIDER that he, Bella Ramsey, and members of the show’s crew staged an epic concert on location in Vancouver’s York Theatre while production moved in.
“On the Sunday before we moved into that set, we all went and had a big jam session,” Gabriel Luna said, listing the various instruments the show’s AD, sound engineer, and more played. “There was a lot of us, cast and crew, at the York Theatre — beautiful theater in downtown Vancouver — playing to a captive audience of all of our crew that was moving in that day.”
Luna revealed that The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey particularly blew him away with their performance.
“Bella played a great version of ‘Linger’ by the Cranberries that I really love,” Luna said.
Fans of The Last of Us were treated to a tease of Ramsey’s talent back in Season 2 Episode 4. In that episode, Ellie and Dina take shelter in a Seattle music store. Ellie plays an acoustic version of Ah-ha’s “Take On Me.” It’s a beautiful performance, but one that Merced told DECIDER doesn’t highlight Ramsey’s full talents.
“Bella is an amazing singer,” Merced said. “So they told Bella, like, ‘You have to kind of tone down your skills a little bit, bro. Like, you’ve got to sound like you don’t actually have as much talent as you do.'”
According to Luna, music has been the way The Last of Us cast has bonded since the very beginning. “Last season, Bella and I would play kind of originals that we wrote for each other, just to get some feedback,” Luna said. “And then this year, we did a lot of the same.”
“I bring my guitar to work and the first season there was only a handful of people that I let touch my guitar — actually, probably just [Bella],” he said. “But this year we have so many more. Young plays, Isabela plays. Tati [Gabrielle], Ariela [Barer], Spencer [Lord], they all play. So there’s a lot more people allowed to play my guitar now.”
When DECIDER asked Isabela Merced if she contributed to the York Theatre concert, she confessed she didn’t even know about it — but for a rather cool reason.
“Oh, I think I was filming Superman,” Merced said, referring to her role playing Hawkgirl in the upcoming summer blockbuster, “but that man will put on a concert anywhere.”
“[Gabriel Luna] will perform anywhere. He just needs a guitar and he’ll just start singing for hours. It is the most entertaining thing.”
So Bella Ramsey has a killer Cranberries cover she’s sitting on, but what did Gabriel Luna play?
“We played a bunch of Nirvana songs and I played ‘Rumble’ by Link Wray. Yeah, so we just jammed out,” Luna said. “That’s a really great memory.”
And we have to imagine that fans of The Last of Us might need some good memories associated with that theater after watching the Season 2 finale.