The Last of Us: We Pick Stars’ Brains About a Tommy/Marlene Tryst, the Video Game’s Alternate (Musical?!) Ending and More

Kimberly Roots

If you haven’t yet witnessed the bizarre glory that is The Last of Us‘ Merle Dandridge and her video-game castmates singing Marlene and Joel’s tension-filled final fight, we’re about to make you happier than Ellie at a Mortal Kombat console.

The video at the top of this post was released years ago and recirculated on social media at the end of the HBO adaptation’s Season 1, courtesy of game- and series co-creator Neil Druckmann. Druckmann’s introduction to the clip explains that, after making sure the game’s production had the footage it needed, he took aside Merle Dandridge — who voiced Marlene in the game and played her in the show — and offered one simple, secret direction for a final take. Then he suggested that Troy Baker, who voiced the game’s Joel, should follow where Dandridge led and play the scene through, no matter what.

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Baker surely did. The result? A musical version of the moment that Troy kills Marlene (and a bunch more Fireflies) to save Ellie. The motion-capture suits are incongruous. The vocals are robust. The vibes are Valjean/Javert. Seriously, if you haven’t pressed PLAY above yet, go give yourself a little treat.

So when TVLine spoke with Dandridge and series co-star Gabriel Luna in advance of the first season’s 4K, Blu-Ray and DVD release — all of which are available today — we had to ask Dandridge to take us inside that moment. (Note: These interviews took place before SAG-AFTRA officially announced a strike on July 13.)

“It’s clear that neither Troy [Baker, who voiced Joel in the game] or I are prepared,” Dandridge said, laughing. “But we clearly had so much fun on set, and we were both musical-theater fans and also had the capacity to carry it out.”

She recalled that she and Baker quickly abandoned a need to stick to every single word of the script. “We were speaking around the lines, so even us going back and forth, singing to each other, was completely just us listening to each other,” she said. “You can see all the people in the background, standing next to cameras, like, ‘What’s happening?!'”

Dandridge attributed the “delightful,” playful interlude to the “familial relationship that we have, the kind of trust and joy that this piece was birthed out of, and then just how much we really liked each other.”

While we chatted with Dandridge and Luna in separate interviews, we congratulated them on the show’s recent 24 Emmy nominations and asked the actors to muse about the show’s highly successful first season. Read on for their thoughts about:

TOMMY AND MARLENE’S ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP? | Luna recalled a conversation he and Dandridge had during the Brazilian fan convention CCXP in 2022. “She was like, ‘You know, I always thought that Tommy and Marlene probably had something going. That’s probably why Joel and Marlene wouldn’t get along, because I was the first wedge that was driven.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I know. I like that. It makes sense.'” In the time since, Luna said, he’s considered why things might have ended between the pair (if they ever, indeed, were lovers — after all, none of this is canon). “She was deep into the cause, and Tommy was slowly making the decision that, whatever the cause, he wasn’t prepared to chip away at his soul the way he was, having to do violence, for whatever reason, toward others. So they just maybe had a difference of theory in what is possible, in terms of life after the outbreak.” He smiled. “She’s a beautiful woman and certainly would have turned Tommy’s head.”

MARLENE AND ANNA 4-EVA | Dandridge said she and Ashley Johnson — who voiced Ellie in the game and its sequel and played Ellie’s mom, Anna, in the series — saw their big finale scene as “a love letter, and a little bit of a callback to all those people who had abided for us for so long with the game.” Viewers will recall that a flashback showed Anna giving birth to Ellie in an empty house during an infected attack; Anna was bit during labor and begged her longtime friend Marlene, who showed up afterward, to kill her before she turned. Marlene refused, but eventually relented in an act of mercy. Anna also entrusted Ellie’s care to Marlene. (Read a full recap.) “In the crevices of the game, there are all these little Easter eggs,” including a letter to Marlene from Anna, Dandridge said. Even given that, “I knew a lot about my story with Anna, but this particular scene, I could not have even imagined.” And the same way that accompanying Joel on his journey throughout the season helps the audience understand the drastic measures he takes at its end, the flashback is “integral to our understanding of how much this costs Marlene,” Dandridge said. “And I think that’s very important, so that she is not perceived as just the villain.”

TOMMY REALLY DID SMELL LIKE SANDALWOOD | Remember after Episode 6, aka the Jackson episode, when a meme circulated about how Joel looked like death and Tommy looked “unreasonably” good? “Hair, slathered in oils, and smelling faintly of sandalwood? No, I didn’t see that,” joked Luna, who engaged online with fans about it at the time. “They weren’t wrong, because I posted on the Internet that my wife had bought me a sandalwood-scented deodorant. So I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s actually what I smell like!'” He said he contributes Tommy’s vitality to finding Maria, and the greater community of Jackson, at exactly the right moment. “Tommy wasn’t ready to snuff out his fire. So he sought it out. He went into the forest to seek it,” Luna explained. “He kind of reached down through the canopy, and she — Maria — just saved him… He used his skills and his leadership, and all of what he could contribute, he brought it to the table for [the band of survivors] and was able to start building. That’s who he is in his heart.”

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