SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 3 of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” now streaming on Max.
While the aftermath of Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) death in “The Last of Us” meant for a quieter, more character-driven episode — as Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) begin their long journey to Seattle — Emmy-winning prosthetics designer Barrie Gower and costume designer Ann Foley had a whole new set of characters to play with in Episode 3: the Scars.
The insidious cult will immediately be familiar to fans of the video game and, in this episode, they are introduced as a mysterious group who communicate through whistling as they travel along a trail in a forest outside Seattle.
For both Gower and Foley, it was important to pull inspiration from Naughty Dog’s visual development material originally created for the game. This included the brown ponchos and braided crown hairstyles on the women.
To create the slight scarring featured on the actors’ faces, Gower and his team discussed how the look would differ based on skin type, ethnicity and age. Kids under 11 or 12 wouldn’t have the scarring, for example. They started off doing tests on the U.K. crew to find a “very clean” look.
“They’re very thin and delicate prosthetic appliances which are made out of a paste, which is the actual adhesive that we glue a lot of prosthetics on with, but it’s whipped up in a food mixer and thickened,” Gower tells Variety. “By sculpting various different shapes and sizes and splitting a couple into two pieces, we’re able to sculpt lots of generic pieces and mix and match them with different performers.”
Gower and the prosthetics department tried out four different versions of the scarring to find the right look. “We did what’s known as the inverted scar, so it’s a depression of the skin. We also tried a raised keloid scarring as well, which is a bit of a departure from what we see in the game,” he says. They settled on the depressive scarring, similar to the game, with the application process on the actors taking just 30-45 minutes everyday.
However, since Episode 3 leaves the true intentions of the Scars unclear, Gower made the distinction that the marks shouldn’t be too intimidating. Later in the episode, Ellie and Dina come across a group of Scars who’ve been murdered, and Ellie wonders out loud whether her own target, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) is repsonsible for the slaughter. The question of who the Scars are is something that will divide those who’ve played the game from the show’s general audience.
“I think they need to be portrayed as they were a clan. They’re very tribal, and it’s seen as a tool to distinguish these people and this group,” Gower says. “We didn’t want to do anything that was really disfiguring. It’s token scarring and it’s so subtle — the appliances are so subtle that we had to be careful the pieces were made in such a way that they didn’t take up too much space on the face. They’re not going to inhibit the actors performances as well.”
For Foley (“The Spiderwick Chronicles”), this episode gave her department a chance to finally “focus on something other than the infected,” she says with a laugh. With the Scars, everything comes back to how they make everything themselves.
“The idea with the ponchos was, ‘Maybe they took this off an old boat and then they created these waterproof ponchos for themselves.’ It’s all of this really great canvas that we found and then broke down,” she says. “Some of that stuff was so stiff you could make a tent out of it. So we sent it to the stone washers and painted into it. The seraphite symbol on the back was all hand-painted by my crew.”
Since filming for the episode took place in Vancouver (made to look like Seattle), practical concerns were taken into consideration with waterproof layers being built into their garments. “If it rains, we’re [still] shooting, and it happened a few times,” Foley says. “They did protect the cast.”
While the introduction of the Scars — and the look of the show — will evolve in Seattle, Foley sees this new tribe as a natural evolution of the characters.
“This season is about community,” Foley says. “Whether it’s the scars or as Craig [Mazin] has mentioned before, even the infected, they’re now their own kind of community. So it’s trying to give every community their own identity. It’s important to do that for the viewer as well so they know who these characters are and can immediately recognize them just by the costumes.”
