Craig Mazin, co-creator of HBO's 'The Last of Us.' Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Craig Mazin will be The Last of Us season three's lone writer after co-creator Neil Druckmann and co-writer Halley Gross announced they were returning to video game studio Naughty Dog to develop a new title. (Druckmann co-developed the original Last of Us game and directed The Last of Us: Part II, which he co-wrote with Gross.) Emmy-winning writer-director Mazin (Chernobyl), who this year is nominated for outstanding drama series, spoke to THR about how the HBO thriller focusing on the survivors of a mass fungal infection that collapses modern-day society has helped level up the art of game-to-small-screen adaptations and whether he's already busy writing the third season. Related Stories TV 'The White Lotus' EP David Bernad on Season Four: "I Know What It Is and Where It's Going" TV HBO's Harry Potter Casts More Weasleys, Including Ginny, George and Fred Video game adaptations are nothing new, but a TV spinoff earning Emmys is. Has The Last of Us proved that video game adaptations can hold their own? Yeah. I think that in the wake of The Last of Us, a ton of video game projects got greenlit. Fallout was already happening, and that was fantastic in its first season, and I'm really looking forward to the second season. There's just this incredible wave coming. Like anything, when people first said, "Hey, let's start adapting books into movies or television shows," some of them are going to be great, some of them will stumble. But the idea that the industry has woken up to how rich some of that storytelling is and how wonderful it is to adapt is fantastic. Where are you with writing season three? This is kind of my favorite time. It's very quiet. It's just sitting here with my wonderful ergonomic keyboard and clacking away. The pages are happening, and I get to be a monk for a while, which I love, and I just write. It's the purest form of what I do. And then in just a couple of months or so, that happy time will start to be less quiet because we begin a very long prep period while I'm still writing, and then we begin to shoot while I'm still writing. In seasons one and two, I finished writing about six weeks before we started shooting the last episode. I don't necessarily recommend this method other than to say this works for me, but it is insane. Now that Druckmann and Gross are stepping away to focus on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, will the writing process change? I don't think it is, in the sense that I was pretty much a monk just writing in a room by myself for most of the time regardless. And I've gotten so much out of talking with them over the course of seasons one and two. When we made season two, we really were thinking about what comes after because you can't really tell half of that story without thinking about what the whole story should be. So we really did get that work in. Neil's always had a full-time job running Naughty Dog, so it's always been me up in Canada [where the production is], and, ultimately, things are pretty much going to proceed as usual. Pedro Pascal and Kaitlyn Dever in episode two of the second season. Courtesy of HBO What were the most challenging scenes to shoot, logistics- and VFX-wise? Episode two, the attack on Jackson, Wyoming, was an enormous undertaking for everybody. It was hard to write, it was hard to plan, it was hard to shoot. The prosthetics, the stunts and then the visual effects afterward were just massive. So we had [VFX houses] Weta and DNEG and about five other companies all working together to create all of the moments, and that was insane. There were nine episodes in the first season but only seven in this one, and yet the pacing feels so different. Despite the fact that everything takes place in a span of three days, the attack on Jackson feels like it was ages ago. How does it compare to the game? The attack on Jackson is not in the video game, so that's new to our show. It's one of those surprises that people who played the game would be like, "Oh!" But, yeah, the characters have gone through quite a bit, but the way we use time, it's almost like so much of season two is really about three days, and I love being able to focus in on a period of time. The Last of Us subreddit is quite a busy place. How closely do you keep track of the chatter and are there responses that surprise you? I don't look at them, so I don't know. Problem solved! I don't go on Reddit. I mean, I'm always playing video games; I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered right now. Sometimes I'll go on Reddit when I'm like, "What is the best bow for an archer build?" That's about as much Redditing as I do. What lessons did you learn from Chernobyl that you brought with you to Th