Troy Baker, one of the most acclaimed and prolific voice actors in the video game scene, is perhaps most known for his role as Joel Miller in the 2013 classic,The Last of Us, and in a recent appearance atMilan Games Week, he admitted that he now better understood Joel’s controversial actions towards the end of the game.
The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us' ending.
As transcribed byIGN, Baker stated that he felt he was at a disadvantage with The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann at the time of filming, when it came to relating to Joel, as Druckmannwasa father at the time. “I was acting,” said Baker. “This was a very real possibility for him… what do I look like in the event that I lose my daughter.”
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Baker is referring, of course, to Joel massacring nearly everyone in the Firefly hospital in order to save his surrogate daughter Ellie. She was to be killed so that a piece of her brain could be used as the foundation for a cure to the cordyceps infection that had been plaguing the world for 20 years. It was undoubtedly a reprehensible thing for Joel to do, but many players related to the idea of doing anything you could to save someone you love, hence it is rather controversial.
Since the making of the original game about ten years ago, Baker had a son, and he explained how much that changed his perspective. “I don’t know what I would like if I lost him.” Baker states that he “would do anything to save him,” so when people ask him why Joel would do such a thing when he had the chance to save the world, his answer to them is, “he did, he did save the world, it’s just that the world was that girl, and that’s it.”
Baker is set to appear in the upcomingThe Last of Us HBOshow,premieringJanuary 15, 2023, which will be an adaptation of the first game’s story. Baker, however, will not play the grizzled co-protagonist this time. Instead, he’ll portray an original character that does not appear in the game, while Joel is set to be played by The Mandalorian star, Pedro Pascal.
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