We’ve had the Runners since the first episode and Clickers in the second, but the just aired fifth episode of HBO’s “The Last of Us” finally introduced the Bloater in live-action form.
With the series having skipped over the two previous in-game appearances (Bill’s Town and Pittsburgh Hotel) by this biggest of the first game’s fungal baddies, they made sure to include one in the new episode which offers an adaptation of ‘The Suburbs’ portion of the game.
Four-time Emmy winner Barrie Gower, the master behind the likes of Vecna on “Stranger Things” and the Night King on “Game of Thrones,” created the bloater in its live-action debut which was a combination of a 6’6 U.K. stuntman wearing a bulky, practical suit and touched up with some CGI.
Speaking with Variety, Gower says they cast the bloater out of foam rubber and foam latex, with the entire suit coming in at 88 pounds/40 kilograms. They then added slimy lubricant to make the fungus pieces stand out more at nighttime.
Added to the scene were 10-15 stunt performers dressed in Clicker costumes and 40-60 extras as Runners. In all it reportedly took a team of 65 prosthetic artists five hours to finish all the makeup for the sequence.
The two main Clicker actors from the second episode returned for this one which saw them each sporting two different costumes for the close-up scenes along with extensive make-up effects. They were joined by a nine-year-old gymnast and contortionist who played the young Clicker in the car and final attack scene.
The other clickers were stunt performers in simpler pullover masks which had “eye socket areas which were like little plugs that we could put in for any close-ups but remove for any mid to wide shots” says Gower.
At 59 minutes, this is one of the longer episodes in the show’s run behind only the season premiere, the third episode, and tied with next week’s sixth episode.
A preview of next week’s episode is out and confirms this is adapting the next level of ‘Tommy’s Dam’ from the game (albeit no hydroelectric dam in sight here), whilst the final shot could be teasing the sequence many people who played the game will distinctly remember – ‘The University’.
It’s previously been indicated there’ll be some Joel flashback in an episode coming up with the sixth episode likely to be that one. That would suggest the seventh episode deals with the University & ‘Left Behind’ events, the eighth with the snow-bound ‘Lakeside Resort’, and the final episode will potentially compress the entire ‘Spring’ section of the game into the shortest runtime of the series at 41 minutes.
