Pedro Pascal Hasn’t Watched The Last of Us Season 1 Finale Yet: ‘It Hurts Too Much’

The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal has revealed that he still hasn’t watched the finale of the show’s first season because of his “emotional attachment to the experience.”

The first season of The Last of Us premiered earlier this year, and the finale drew in huge viewership numbers – but Pascal was not among them. In an interview with Steven Yuen for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Pascal explained why he stopped short of watching the ending.

“I saw it all up until then,” he said. “I haven’t done anything for that amount of time before, and so my attachment to the experience is strange. As a guy who’s pushing 50, to feel this very innocent, semi-angry, emotional attachment to an experience that’s over…

“It continues, but there will never be another meeting Bella [Ramsey] for the first time, working with Craig [Mazin], with the entire crew, with my friend Coco, who did my hair, and the whole family experience of it,” he added. “I think it was like falling in love, and at the point where you’re like, ‘I don’t fall in love.’ You know? Because it hurts too much.”

The Last of Us hit the ground running in January, achieving HBO’s second-best debut of the last decade. The series averaged 30.4 million viewers across its first six episodes, and its highly anticipated finale brought in the largest audience of the season.

Over the impactful first season, we followed Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) through the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Cordyceps-infected America in the hopes of finding the Fireflies and their potential cure, but the final episode brought with it a shocking twist.

The second season will adapt Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II, and showrunner Craig Mazin has already said that the events of the second game cover “more than a season’s worth of television,” implying that they will split the sequel into two or more seasons.

Mazin and executive producer Neil Druckmann have also teased that Season 2 will feature moments that are “radically different” from the game and will likely have much more action and more infected, with multiple types of infected emerging as the series goes on.

Fans still have a little while to wait for Season 2 to hit screens, though. Star Bella Ramsey recently said in an appearance on the Jonathan Ross Show that the follow-up will likely shoot at the end of this year, meaning Season 2 will debut “probably at the end of 2024, early 2025.”

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.