Gabriel Luna: ‘I read the last of us manuscript on a plane and cried my eyes publicly’

IT was a dry day in October 2021, and Gabriel Luna Mooched around London Comic Con. A few months had passed since HBO had thrown the twin stars in its lavish new video game adjustment The last of us – ex- ex-Game of Thrones Favorites Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey – and a random on the event made his choice to play Tommy, the brother of Pascal’s Jaded Apocalypse Survivor Joel Miller.

“I remember this voice from the void was like, ‘Do you know who to play him? Gabriel Luna.’ I’ve never thought about it twice, ”Luna is buzzing. “But that child had some incredible foresight. She had to go into casting.”

It’s now four years later, and Luna is back in London sitting opposite me next to the window of a Soho hotel room. The 42-year-old actor is here to talk about the second season of The last of usWhere he plays – you guessed it – Tommy. There is something sturdy confident about Luna – maybe it’s the glass neat mezcal he’s sipping. Or the way he shakes my hand twice before the interview begins, throwing a kind of congenial, bro-y dap for a good scale.

Luna had been kicking around the industry for a while before The last of usappear in movies like The Jack Black-Richard Linklater Dramedy Bernie (2011) and the second series of Real detective in 2015. He rose first to prominent character and played Ghost Rider in the Marvel TV series Agents of shieldand continued to produce the mechanical villain in Arnold Schwarzenegger -The Successor in 2019 Terminator: Dark Fate. (“Critically, people really liked it … it did as $ 300 million, which was considered a huge failure,” he says, rolling his eyes.)

The last of usHowever, seems to be set to Burnish Luna’s reputation further. He highlighted briefly in the first season that debuted for Effusive reviews back in 2023, but returns to the Emmy-winning drama this month with a far greaten part.

Luna hadn’t played Last of us Video games, when he was offered that part of Tommy-Men, quickly blasted through the acclaimed 2013 release, a deeply human history of grief and fatherhood in a world exceeded by zombie-like “infected”. “I had finished it about three days before I sent out to Calgary to film,” he remembers. “And then [series showrunner Craig Mazin] sent me all manuscripts. ”

Among these was the manuscript for section three, “long, long,”, the heartbreaking standout from season one that depicted a decades of tense love affair between characters played by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett. “I read it in the plane and shouted my eyes in front of a bunch of people,” Luna says. “It was so beautiful, even in black and white.”

Season two, a revenge story and road-trip narrative that puts a lot of the limelight on Ramsey’s Jaded teenager Ellie, gives Luna plenty to do. Tommy reviews some of the crazy human emotions: sorrow, anger, despair. And when the emotional efforts escalate, do it too. Section two sent earlier this month contains an extended fighting sequence as “infected” will rise down on the snow -capped human settlement of Jackson, Wyoming.

“It’s more like we are shooting a big blockbuster feature,” says Luna. “That episode took a month and a half to shoot. So many feature films, both independent and study, are recorded [over that amount of time]. We spared no expenses to maintain the quality that people who see HBO Sunday night expect. ”

With streaming that does not have -overwhelmed viewers from a rigid weekly schedule, HBO’s famous Sunday night is now more symbolic than anything else. But The last of us is nevertheless part of a magnificent descent that includes seminal -tv series such as SuccessionAt Game of ThronesAt The soprano and Sex in town. Despite the show’s grounding in an apparent low-prestige genre-zombie fiction-raised Luna that The last of us deserves to be talked about in the same breath. (Appropriate enough was that Succession Veteran Mark Mylod who helped his flagship’s second episode.)

Luna explains that Mazin, previously known for having written the gushingly received miniseries Chernobylwould insert subtitle directly into the manuscript – double meaning in unspoken parentheses. “It’s this really unique thing where he writes in a lot of subtitle. It’s very Billy Shakespeare of him,” he says flashing. “I haven’t really seen it done [so explicitly] Much in the work of other authors. “

He continues: “But because [Mazin] Writes each letter in each word in each script, you don’t lose throughline. A character doesn’t say anything in section six that sounds like it is coming from another voice. Often, when you shop with shows that have a large writer’s room, you start to get the feeling that there is an interruption between the character’s past and where they are going. “

His name is not and ashamed of any productions in particular, but Luna had his reasonable proportion of experience in more conventional TV environments. There was MatadorWhere he played a star football player who lives a double life as a CIA agent. There was Agents of shielda spin-off from Marvel’s Avengers Film tips speared by Joss Whedon; Luna joined that series in 2016 and portrayed Robert Reyes, alias Ghost Rider, the cyclist whose head sometimes turns into a flaming skull. There were a handful of one -off appearance in shows such as Prison break and NCIS: Los Angeles. Then there were the 2023s FUBARThere reunited Luna with Arnie for an eight-episoded action comedy.

At times during our conversation, Luna’s phrasing takes on a kind of Old Testament greatness. “I hope to embody the properties of both lion and lamb,” he loses. “The strength and power of a lion, but the tenderness and sensitivity of a lamb.

“It was my approach to The last of usAnd to Terminator. Will you be a devastating ball as [Schwarzenegger’s] T-800? Or a cold sword, like T-1000 [Robert Patrick’s liquid-metal baddie in T2: Judgment Day]? I always said: I’m like Ted Bundy by Terminators. “(OK, maybe it’s not to biblical.)

In America, this wedge is run between everyone. What is good about ‘The Last of Us’ is that everyone is represented

Gabriel Luna

Luna was born in Austin, Texas, in 1982, three months after his father died aged only 20 years. His mother became a widow of 15 years old; Luna was bred by her and his grandmother. (“We were pretty poor,” he remembers.) Still, it was his father who inspired his acting career; He took on his first role, a starring role in a school game, after discovering a VHS video of his late father, who appeared in a church game he had also written and directed.

In an Instagram post that was shared back in January, Luna wrote that he is now more than twice the age of his father when he died and noted, “I have always kept the belief that his soul is running with me as I move through life.”

You get the feeling that Luna is a fighter. As an actor of Mexican descent, he has constantly had to justify his presence in the industry in a way that white actors do not have. “When I played Robert Reyes, the ghost rider, who was a Mexican-American version of the character, had problems,” he says. “When I did Terminator, who was a dark-skinned version of it, people had trouble-what did not make sense because it is a robot. Why would the robot not be sent to Mexico City, to infiltrate the local population, the local population does not think logically.

“And then,” he continues, “when Pedro [Pascal] And I was thrown in The last of usThere was a lot of screams about ‘why don’t they look like their [white] Video game moderies? ‘I’ve always taken it as a challenge. “With the second season, which is now well underway, the voices of all Bigoted Dissents have become well and really drowned by thunderous praise.

Luna takes a moment before we wrap up, to praise his co-stars Pascal (“You real Game of Thrones And thinking, ‘that child acts as if they are nine meters high’).

He shakes my hand for the third time and we exchange our goodbye – but not until one last word on the series. “In America, this wedge is run between everyone,” he says. “What is good about The last of us is that everyone is represented. Everyone is forced to collide and overlap and live among each other. It’s not done in a way that is This group or that group. It’s a story that forces you to consider things that make you ask questions.

“And that,” he adds, “is what great art does.”

‘The Last of Us’ can be streamed in the sky and now in the UK, with new episodes arriving every Monday