Part 1 of two-part interview with The Last Of Us creator Craig Mazin about series’ 24 Emmy nominations, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and Season 2 of the hit HBO series.
In 2019, Craig Mazin’s Chernobyl landed 19 Emmy nominations and converted 10 into wins, including two for Mazin, Outstanding Limited Series and Writing. Four years later, Mazin’s followup for HBO, The Last Of Us, received 24 noms on Wednesday, including Outstanding Drama Series and Writing for Mazin’s standout Episode 3 script, Long, Long Time.
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Despite the massive nomination haul, bringing the first major awards recognition to a live-action series based on a video game, Emmy glory was not on Mazin’s mind when making The Last Of Us, an adaptation of what he calls “in my opinion, the best story ever told in the video game genre.”
“Anybody that expects any of these things when you start is nuts because making things, it’s just really hard. And making a show like The Last of Us is especially difficult because it’s so big, and it takes so long, and the longer you work on something, the more chances you have to mess it up, basically.
“For The Last Of Us, we shot for 200 days,” Mazin continued. “You get to the end of that and you’re just desperate to get in the editing room and make something out of it that will not make you feel terrible. So, when you have between 30 and 40 million people watching the show every week in the United States alone well, okay, now I’m happy. And when this happens with the Emmys, that to me is all about the joy of seeing the people that I worked with being celebrated because so many of those people just never get recognized for the work they do, but they’re with me every day. That part has been fantastic.”
Mazin, fellow The Last Of Us co-creator/executive producer Neil Druckmann and stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey watched the live nominations announcement of the main categories where Pascal, Ramsey and the show all got shoutouts before Mazin grasped the magnitude of the show’s Emmy performance while perusing the full list of nominations.
“For the rest of the day, I was texting and calling and writing, and I spoke to everybody one way or another,” he said.
That includes 10-year-old Keivonn Montreal Woodard, nominated in the Guest Actor category.
“I mean, this is a kid who had never acted before. And he and his mom, who are both deaf, get on a plane, fly to a country they’d never been to, to do something they’ve never done and on the largest scale there is to do something, a massive HBO flagship Sunday night show production. And he was amazing,” Mazin said about Woodard making his acting debut on the Canadian set of The Last Of Us.
“Kid actors are often not great. He was great from the start; his mother was lovely; we had this wonderful team around him to help him and to help us communicate with him freely and easily. Lamar Johnson, who also got nominated and played his brother, learned all of his lines in sign language and was able to perform them perfectly so that you’d never watched and go, Oh, I don’t actually believe that they’re brothers talking to each other their whole lives like this. They make you believe; the two of them are a miracle, and I was so happy to see them both get nominated.”
Woodard and Johnson are among a staggering seven The Last Of Us guest actors landing Emmy nominations, alongside Anna Torv, Melanie Lynskey, Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett, and Storm Reid. While grateful and not wanting to sound greedy, Mazin admitted that he would’ve liked to see a few others, like Nico Parker, Gabriel Luna and Merle Dandridge, also recognized.
“But I was thrilled, overall my feeling is, there’s one nomination that means the most, and that is Best Dramatic Series. Okay, that covers everybody — we’re not the best without everybody participating,” Mazin said.
It is a validation of the creative choices he and his team made amid an intense scrutiny by fans of the video game who dissected their every decision, including the casting of the lead characters Joel and Ellie with Pascal and Ramsey. “It was upsetting to see some of the things that people would say,” Mazin said about the online criticism but added that he, Pascal and Ramsey understood it and knew fans would embrace their versions of the character — which they eventually did.
Two of the 2023 Writing for a Drama Series Emmy nominations went to creators who write their shows by themselves, Mazin, who works on The Last Of Us alongside the writer of the video game it is based on, Druckmann, and The White Lotus‘ Mike White.
“Well, I think that there are a lot of different ways to make a television show. I think that Mike White and I probably do it fairly similarly,” Mazin said before giving credit to his cast and crew for his recognition.
“The audience doesn’t read the script, they watch the show, and getting nominated for something like writing is dependent on how it was directed and how it was performed and edited and scored. I don’t get too wrapped up in the auteurism of it all because I don’t believe in a ‘film by’, I don’t believe in ‘TV show by’. I think we are a massive family and that is particularly on my mind today. Because obviously the town is now completely on strike. And I’m standing shoulder to shoulder with my fellow writers and now, my fellow actors because I’m technically an actor, barely.”
Mazin has four acting credits, most notably a recurring role on Mythic Quest.
“But more importantly, I’m thinking about all of our crews,” he continued. “I’m thinking about the people that make our shows who are going to be suffering alongside us, even as we’re the ones who are fighting for contracts. Those are the people I’m thinking about today, my mind is really on the crew. And I think we’re all rather upset with the companies right now. They are hurting so many people with their intransigence. Ultimately, it comes down to these corporations just getting it because they don’t get it right now. And they’re going to have to.”
One of the proposals the WGA has been floating involved minimum staffing, requiring a min number of writers employed by a show. Would Mazin be OK with that?
“I’ve talked to the union and their explanation to me was such that I understood it would not change the way I write. That’s the most important thing; I have a method as a writer, and it’s the only method I have,” Mazin said. “So I called [WGA negotiating committee co-chair] Chris Keyser when the proposal was initially put out and said, ‘Do I have to like, move to another country?’ And he’s like, No, you don’t have to move to another country. Here is how it would work, and I said, Okay.”
While Mazin is not sure how the individual demands would ultimately work, “all I know in my heart is that for the writers and the actors, the strike is not going to end until the companies address these fundamental problems that they have created. They made this mess. They know they’ve made this mess. It’s not like they like each other either, they don’t.”
“And they’re going to have to figure out how to get out of this; they have essentially painted themselves into a corner,” Mazin continued. “This isn’t like anything before. It’s certainly not like 2007, and I have not been alive at a time when the actors and the writers stuck together. That’s how long it’s been, and that’s how bad I think the companies have messed up here. I don’t know what’s going happen, I just want to get back to work but we can’t get back to work until they do the right thing. It’s as simple as that.”
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