Kaitlyn Dever Shares a Heartbreaking Detail About THAT ‘The Last of Us’ Scene

If you haven’t yet watched “Through the Valley,” Episode 2 of Season 2 of The Last of Us, you’re going to want to bookmark this page and come back. Because there are SPOILERS AHEAD.

If you have watched it, you know that the game has changed. And now understand the vital role that Abby, Kaitlyn Dever’s character, will play in the rest of the season—if not the rest of the series. While we knew that Abby’s journey to Jackson was one motivated by vengeance, few viewers expected just how quickly—or how brutally—that would happen.

Related: ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2: Who is Eugene, the Mysterious Man Joel Killed?

Entertainment Weekly was given a front-row seat to how Sunday night’s episode went down, with a cover story featuring Dever, Bella Ramsey, and Pedro Pascal—plus interviews with all three of the stars plus co-showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann. It’s a fascinating read about how a key moment in a series can change everything for the actors as well as the viewers. But Dever’s story about the lead-up to the scene in which she exacts her revenge on Joel (Pascal) for killing her father is deeply personal, and fairly heartbreaking.

Dever shared that the first scene she shot for The Last of Us, and the first time she worked with Pascal, was to film his violent death scene, which came with its own inherent challenges. “It was just a massive scene emotionally, and with blocking, too,” the 28-year-old actress shared. “There were so many moving parts and so many things to navigate.”

But it turned out that there was also an emotional component that made the scene extra challenging. “To be as honest as possible, I will just say that my days leading up to this scene were horrible,” said Dever.

Just weeks before she was on set in Canada, Dever’s mother died after a 14-year battle with breast cancer. She shared the devastating news in an Instagram post at the time, which included several throwback photos of Dever and her mom alongside a sweet tribute where she noted, “I will be broken forever without you and I don’t know how I’ll go on.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kaitlyn Dever (@kaitlyndever)

Just weeks later, Dever was on The Last of Us set with the sole task of seeking revenge on the person who (in the series) took her parent away. And inflicting the same exact pain on Ramsey’s Ellie. The emotionality of the scene was not lost on Dever—nor the showrunners.

“I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene [on The Last of Us],” Dever said. “And my mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day. So I was sort of in a fog. I was in a daze.”

(For the record, Mazin and Druckmann told Dever to take all the time she needed. “I'm not going to disrupt someone’s grieving process for their own parent, especially [with] a show that’s partly about the grieving process,” said Mazin.

But the always-professional Dever was ready to fulfill the obligations she had made, even if she wasn’t able to function or prep in her normal way. She noted that she was pretty much living on donut holes and coffee because “that’s all I was in the mood for. Because of my life circumstances, I wasn’t actually able to do my normal routine as an actor, which was really interesting because I was kind of worried about it.”

Dever continued: “Usually if I have a monologue like that, I’m memorizing it three weeks before I do it. I had a different approach, and I think that it really served the character in a lot of ways. I was able to sort of… I don't know, just really let it go and not think about it too much because the words on the page are so powerful anyway.”