Troy Baker, who is part of The Last of Us as the iconic voice of Joel, is currently as invested in the HBO series as everyone else.
In addition to that, Baker will also play a small role in the series’ upcoming episodes.
But before we can rejoice about seeing him on screen, Baker is now opening up about a Joel scene that did not make it into the games!
“I think it is a wonderful exercise for any actor to come in with a backstory. If it isn’t there on the page, make something up, if necessary… There was a shoot we did nobody knows about, I am going to get in trouble for saying this, but in between Part One and Part Two, where we were kind of testing out some new tech, and just Neil and I went down to a different stage than we shot on in San Diego, and he was like, ‘I want to do a couple scenes from this, because I do not really have anything written so far, but I have an idea of a scene for this. Are you comfortable kind of running a scene by yourself?'” Troy Baker shared via ComicBook.com and ET’s The Last of Pods show.
He went on to mention that, as a result, “there is a scene we just kind of made up on the fly about Joel going into a bar. And so there are all of these backstory moments that we get to find out what happened; where’s Sarah’s mom? What happened to that relationship? What is the schism between he and Tommy?”
Sure enough, there is a significant amount of backstory that remains a mystery to the player in The Last of Us games.
When the game truly begins, Joel is an aged, emotionally guarded man whose past life is long gone.
Furthermore, by the time the second game starts, he is in a more somber and quiet place in his life, having opened up as much as he could to some of his close ones, especially to Ellie.
All of that works out fine for the games, however, because players only need to focus on connecting to Joel’s main motivation, which is to protect Ellie.
As is frequently recognized, HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation is obviously a different story in more ways than one.
Regarding characters, backstories, and even lore, viewers feel that there are many questions that may just need to be acknowledged this time around.
Thankfully, it sounds like the HBO creative team, made up of Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, is all aware of this.
As Baker noted, the show is making good use of its unique chance to elaborate on material that the games did not really need to at the time of their development.
“This is what the show has the ability to do…’ Well, let’s take a look at Joel’s backstory, and let’s learn more about that,’ and there’s a beautiful thing that happens, as you see now.”