The Last of Us showrunner is 'incredibly proud' to have raised the profile of game adaptations

Despite the bad rap that has come with the very idea of video game adaptations, HBO's The Last of Us continues to be an unwavering success in that arena. Following glowing critical praise and sky-high ratings, the sci-fi drama series earned 24 Emmy nominations this week, making it the first movie or show based on a video game to receive major awards recognition.

Craig Mazin, who showruns The Last of Us with one of the games' creators, Neil Druckmann, is pretty succinct with his response: "It feels great."

"To the extent that we've helped raise the profile of an art form, I'm incredibly proud," he tells EW. Mazin credits Druckmann and his gaming studio, Naughty Dog, for creating "one of the best video games of all time." To him, it feels almost like "cheating" to make an adaptation from such rich source material.

"That said, I think we're all pretty aware that adapting video games is at best difficult and at worst hopeless," Mazin continues. "There's some games you just can't. They're just not meant to be adapted, but this one was. It was hard work to do, but I did it with Neil, and the two of us did it out of love. I think a lot of other adaptations from the video game genre have started with a company buying the rights to something based on metrics and then calling people and saying, 'We want you to exploit this IP,' which is a horrible sentence. That is not how this worked. This worked with a fan [Mazin] going to a creator [Druckmann], the two of them having a meeting of the minds, and then the two of them going to HBO and saying, 'Let us do this, please!'"

Among the onslaught of Emmy nominations, Pedro Pascal received a lead actor nomination for his performance as Joel, a hardened survivor and black-market dealer living in a militarized Boston quarantine zone, years after a zombie-like fungal plague decimated the human population. His young costar, Bella Ramsey, who uses they/them pronouns, also received a lead actress nomination for their performance as Ellie, a teenage girl with a mysterious immunity to the virus whom Joel is tasked with escorting across what's left of America.

In a somewhat surprising development, the majority of the supporting and guest players on The Last of Us also received nominations: Anna Torv as Tess, Joel's lover and partner in the Boston QZ; Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett as Bill and Frank, two survivors living in their own booby-trapped suburban community; Melanie Lynskey as Kathleen, a warlord Joel and Ellie encounter in Kansas City; Lamar Johnson and Keivonn Montreal Woodard as brothers Henry and Sam, who are on the run from Kathleen's forces; and Storm Reid as Riley, Ellie's former teen crush.

Mazin gathered on Zoom Wednesday morning to watch the Emmy nomination announcements with Druckmann, Pascal, Ramsey, Offerman, and executive producers Jacqueline Lesko and Carolyn Strauss. After the news came out, he contacted Bartlett, Lynskey, Johnson, and Reid. "Basically I was just texting and emailing everybody across multiple continents, covering the U.S. and Canada and the U.K. and Malta and Australia," he says, laughing.

Mazin is particularly impressed by Woodard's nomination. The actor was 8 when he started filming his episodes of The Last of Us. "He hadn't acted before," the showrunner says of the now-10-year-old performer. "He's such a great kid, and now he's got an Emmy nomination."

For Mazin, the nominations are bittersweet. On top of Outstanding Drama Series, he was personally nominated for writing the emotionally wrenching Bill and Frank episode, "Long Long Time," which he speaks of in a highly modest fashion as he credits the work of actors Offerman and Bartlett, director Peter Hoar, editors Tim Good and Emily Mendez, and composer Gustavo Santaolalla, all of whom earned their own nods. ("Everybody's work coming together, it's beyond script and now it's this other beautiful thing.")

But speaking amid the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike and a day before the actors of SAG-AFTRA would also vote to strike, Mazin admits, "It's a rough day. It's weird. It's like you want to jump up and down and be thrilled, but I'm also aware that a lot of people in our business are really struggling right now. To the extent that it was great to see so many folks from our crew get nominated, I just want to spend as much time as I can singing their praises because they're taking it on the chin. Until the companies step up and do the right thing, we're all struggling as a business."

He adds, "I think I'm halfway from here to the moon."

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