Since its first season, HBO’s The Last of Us has shown a canny knack for creative casting, placing beloved TV actors in novel situations in its zombie-adjacent world. Season 1’s “Long, Long Time” is often held up as the high-water mark for the series, casting Parks and Rec’s Nick Offerman and The White Lotus’ Murray Bartlett as two men who find love after the apocalypse. The presence of their recognizable faces helped audiences emotionally connect with their characters in only one episode.
Season 2 has been a bit lighter on these kinds of moves, but episode six, “The Price,” used some clever casting to make a long-teased death even more heartbreaking. The mystery of what happened to Gail’s (Catherine O’Hara) husband Eugene had been brewing all season, and “The Price” finally gave viewers an answer. While this scene would likely have been upsetting no matter what, it hit home even harder due to the casting of Joe Pantoliano.
Season 2’s Eugene Mystery
HBO
(The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 6)
Eugene’s fate was alluded to all the way back in Season 2’s first episode, when Gail has a therapy session with Joel (Pedro Pascal). Gail reveals her anger at Joel for killing Eugene, even though she acknowledges he had no choice in the matter. Viewers can surmise that infection was most likely the cause, but the details weren’t made entirely clear. What was abundantly clear was that Gail was unable to forgive Joel, regardless of the circumstances.
Eugene is remembered fondly by the community of Jackson Hole even five years after his death, and “The Price” finally shows exactly what happened. While out on patrol, Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) get word of another group fending off the infected and go to help. By the time they arrive, they find Eugene alone in the woods, with a bite mark on his abdomen. Eugene pleads to be able to return to Jackson Hole to say goodbye to Gail, and Joel reluctantly agrees.
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Or at least, that’s what he tells Ellie. Instead of taking Eugene back to town, Joel leads him to a lake, where he offers to share any last words before putting him down. Eugene continues to plead, but eventually relents, and Joel shoots him. When they return to town, Joel lies to Gail, telling her Eugene was brave about it and ended things on his own terms, but Ellie doesn’t let him get away with it. Joel quickly reneging on his word to Ellie adds more fuel to her nagging concerns that he might not have been honest with her about what happened at the Firefly hospital five years earlier.
Eugene is hardly stoic or noble in the face of death, and his naked need to see his wife one last time makes the scene emotionally devastating, even as audiences have hardly spent any time with the character. Pantoliano’s extraordinarily moving performance does a lot of the heavy lifting.
Why Pantoliano’s Casting Works So Well
Pantoliano hasn’t been acting as much in recent years, but he’s still a recognizable face for longtime HBO viewers, largely due to his role as Ralph “Ralphie” Cifaretto in Seasons 3 and 4 of The Sopranos. Ralphie was one of the most loathsome characters Sopranos creator David Chase and his fellow writers ever created; a cruel, venal bully who used his status as a mob captain to insulate himself from his bad behavior. Obviously, pretty much all the characters on The Sopranos did that to one extent or another, but Ralphie crossed lines even the others refused to cross.
Pantoliano played Ralphie to the hilt, and it’s a testament to his skills as an actor that the character made for one of the most memorable antagonists of the series. In the ’90s and ’00s, Pantoliano had a knack for playing bad guys, making indelible heel turns in movies like 1999’s The Matrix and 2000’s Memento. His casting as Eugene provides a quick nostalgia hit for viewers who grew up with his onscreen presence, which quickly helps to establish an emotional connection to the character.
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Beyond the nostalgia factor, Pantoliano’s casting works in a way that’s not entirely unlike O’Hara’s, subverting the viewer’s expectations about the kinds of characters he’s most famous for playing. While O’Hara’s experience in comedy makes her dramatic turn as Gail that much more powerful, Pantoliano’s memorable bad guy roles make his much more tender turn as Eugene surprising. Based on the actor’s most well-known roles, viewers might think Eugene’s going to be sarcastic or defiant up to the end, but this turns out to be very much not the case.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, series co-creator and episode director Neil Druckmann talked about how Pantoliano brought an unexpected dimension to Eugene. While the script initially leaned more into dark humor for his death scene, Pantoliano decided to go in a more pitiable direction, making him regress and act almost childlike in his final moments. It’s a small detail that speaks to Pantoliano’s skill as an actor, that someone so good at playing characters an audience loves to hate can also make a one-scene role so gutting.
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