The Last of Us, HBO’s hit series based on the best-selling video game franchise, seems to have found a sweet spot in the cultural zeitgeist: the sci-fi horror drama that centers around a global pandemic feels both startlingly familiar and otherworldly all at once.
One of the things contributing to the success of the show is its look and feel—its production design and environments, but the costumes, too, courtesy of designer Cynthia Summers. The show focuses on the relationship between Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they traverse a miserable post-pandemic landscape; the costumes span from the initial 2023 outbreak to the present day, meaning the show’s “breakdown department,” responsible for aging and distressing clothes, was hard at work. (Less hard: working with Pedro Pascal, whom Summers recalls hand-delivered fast food for the crew during a company move.)
Summers spoke about using the video game as inspiration, how she made brand new clothing look like it survived an apocalypse, and more.
The source material for The Last of Us is a video game. What’s it like to costume for an adaptation of a video game versus a book or a movie? What makes that unique?
Cynthia Summers: Adapting from a video game can be really tricky. And I think that the general consensus is it’s hazardous to do it because gamers are so invested in the game. They become characters in the game—they really are living the game, in some sense of the word. So taking their favorite characters from an animated world and bringing them to real life is tricky.
It’s like building a wedding dress for someone, you know? It’s so personal. You really need to honor visually what’s happening in the game with the characters, with the sets, with the dialogue, with the storyline. That being said, when you take characters that, their purpose is survival—that actually translates really well into a human story, a very human story.
When I first was approached about it, I was like, “Well, okay, it’s another video game adaptation. It’s jeans and t-shirts. It’s 2003, Austin, Texas.” So fashion-wise: suburban, working class people. So I don’t know what’s in it for me. How much of the game are we doing, exactly? Is there any room for expansion? It’s not period, it’s not futuristic, it’s not fantasy.
But [it’s] the first time I’ve seen contemporary clothing, contemporary costumes be so importantly a part of a very human, beautiful, horrible, and cinema-graphically shot show.
A lot of times in dystopian or apocalyptic shows, the costuming is sort of fantastical—like __Blade Runner __or Mad Max. But with** The Last of Us**, I think the costuming really drives home the realism of these characters—that this isn’t an alternate universe.**
Totally. And that was a point driven home by [showrunner] Craig [Mazin]: that he wanted the characters to look real and relatable and accessible. And that makes the scary part of the show scarier.
Caroline Reilly
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