This article contains spoilers for the final episode of The Last of Us.
Three years ago, Kaitlyn Dever came across a YouTube video that would help her through the worst period of her life. It’s a clip from Stephen Colbert’s late-night interview with Andrew Garfield, which stands out from all other late-night interviews because it swaps the usual translucent banter for genuine vulnerability.
In it, Colbert asks Garfield how his work helped him deal with the loss of his mother, who had passed away from pancreatic cancer a couple of years prior. Garfield lowers his chin just a little and exhales. “I love talking about it, by the way,” he says, before he answers the question, “so if I cry, it’s only a beautiful thing.” He then speaks sincerely for a couple of minutes about love, loss and processing grief through art, pausing here and there to stop himself from choking up. “I’m indebted to everyone who has brought me to this place so that I can honor [my mom] through my art, and use it as a way to heal; use it as a way to sew up the wounds.”
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For Dever, whose own mother, Kathy, was in the midst of a decade-plus-long battle with breast cancer, this was a life raft. “I would google it and watch it often,” Dever says, “because I always felt like… the worst thing in my life that could happen was losing my best friend. And I always thought that I wouldn’t be able to go on. But then I’d look at Andrew and think, well, his life seems to be moving forwards.”
Kathy had been sick for so long that Dever found herself in an endless cycle of hope, anxiety, and denial. “The other feeling I had was, Oh, I’m never gonna be in his position,” she says. “My brain would always say, But that’s not gonna be me.” At the end of 2023 Kathy’s health took a sharp decline, and in February 2024, she died. “I don’t even know how to describe it, because it was the worst time in my life,” Dever says, reflecting on that period a little over a year later. “I still am in shock.”
Dever began filming The Last of Us, HBO’s post-apocalyptic thriller about survivors during a zombie-adjacent outbreak, three days after her mother’s funeral. It was the biggest job of her career so far, and she started with its most pivotal scene to date—in which her character, Abby, an emotionally ravaged militant, tortures and murders Joel, the show’s beloved anti-hero, played by Pedro Pascal. Here, a little sooner than anticipated, was an opportunity to tend to this great wound. “There was no time for any rehearsal,” she says, “we just went straight into it.”