Jeffrey Pierce Praises Gabriel Luna’s Tommy in The Last of Us

Jeffrey Pierce holds a gun in The Last of Us.

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for The Last of Us episode 5!

In The Last of Us on HBO, actor Jeffrey Pierce stars as Perry, Kathleen’s right-hand man and leader of her military unit. In the video game, Pierce portrayed Joel’s brother Tommy, played by Gabriel Luna in the show. But it’s all good between them. While speaking with GamesRadar+, Pierce expressed his approval of Luna’s Tommy, and praised the actor for honoring the character in The Last of Us.

“I absolutely love his performance. I feel like he took such great care to honor what was there, and then brought all of his talent and all of his skill and all of his sort of charisma and strength to it, and, and really, absolutely shines,” Pierce said. “The second I saw him on, on screen, I saw some stills and I was like, yeah, [expletive] yeah, that is all Tommy right there.”

“Tommy is not me. It’s a wonderful sort of combination of a lot of people who have put a lot of care into it,” Pierce continued. “So I’ve never felt protective of somebody taking the role away. And what he did is he took everything that we did to create Tommy to begin with, honored that, and then brought himself.”

In the fifth episode, Perry and the rest of the militia corner Henry, Ellie, Sam, and Joel in a neighborhood just outside the tunnels. Before Kathleen can shoot Henry, a large truck falls underground, releasing a group of infected who wreak havoc on the militia. To buy Kathleen time, Perry sacrifices himself by taking on a bloater, who brutally kills the militia leader within seconds. Perry loved his ending and likened his death to that of an honorable samurai.

“I love it because I sort of imagined that the way that I would want to conceive Perry is this sort of, you know, samurai who lost his cause and then found it with Kathleen,” Pierce said. “And then he gets this absolutely objectively honorable death where he sacrifices himself to try to give her the time to escape.”

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“So on, on that note alone, I’m all in,” Pierce added. “But I also like the idea that this guy who’s carrying an M-4 and a 45 and a Beretta and a [Gurkha] knife and two bayonets, that no amount of skill, no amount of guns [matters] when it’s your time there, there is no sort of magic bullet here with all of these gear and all these guns.”

The next episode of The Last of Us premieres on Sunday, February 19, on HBO.

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Recommended Reading: The Art Of The Last Of Us

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