“When I first read that, I was like, ‘Jesus Christ! That is something that we don’t see in the game,'” the actress tells EW in an exclusive interview.

Kaitlyn Dever feels a sense of relief. Longtime fans of The Last of Us who’ve played the video games have known all about her character, Abby, and the trauma she inflicts on Joel (Pedro Pascal), Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and those watching at home. But not so much everyone else, so she felt the need to walk on egg shells throughout the press tour for season 2 of the HBO drama. Now that the big secret’s out, though, she doesn’t have to anymore.

“It’s like, I can talk about it, I can’t talk about it, but now I can talk about it, which is great news,” the Booksmart and Unbelievable star says during an exclusive interview for Entertainment Weekly‘s cover story. “I can relax a little.”

“Through the Valley,” the second episode of The Last of Us season 2, took a big swing Sunday night in adapting a pivotal moment from the games. Abby, a former Firefly and the daughter of the doctor Joel gunned down in the season 1 finale, tracked down her father’s killer and beat him to death with a golf club, killing off one of the show’s two lead characters.

Right from the jump, Dever, who has a long history with Naughty Dog, the gaming studio behind The Last of Us, knew the adaptation would present this moment differently than in the source material. The intense hour of television opens with a fresh scene that was uniquely designed by showrunner and writer Craig Mazin: Abby confronts her younger self in a dream as if trying to warn her what will happen if she opens that hospital door and discovers her dad’s dead body.

“I had laryngitis, too, when I did that scene. So it was so intense,” Dever recalls. “But, yeah, it was a really sad scene. It broke my heart to have to shoot that.”

Dever, whose body of work also consists of alien-abduction horror No One Will Save You, scammer drama Apple Cider Vinegar, and Shakespeare reimagining Rosaline, had never acted opposite herself before The Last of Us. She filmed the younger Abby bits first and then delivered her remarks as older Abby, discussing the approach with Mazin along the way.

“As an audience member, getting to see this side of her is really important and really profound,” the actress says. “That allows you to literally step inside Abby’s brain. It just encapsulates everything that she’s feeling for that scene that comes after. She so badly wants her old life back. She so badly wants the situation to not be what it is. That was the most important thing to me in playing that scene, is just wanting to make it all stop. I almost think that some part of her, too, thinks that she could have done something about it, or there’s some survivor’s guilt there. I think that’s really, really powerful.”

Part of these changes from the game stem from wanting an audience to empathize with Abby. The Last of Us Part II, released in 2020, has the advantage of allowing gamers to play as both Abby and Ellie at different parts of the narrative to help disseminate backstory and forge a bond with this complicated character. The first half focuses primarily on Ellie’s perspective; you don’t know much at all about Abby by the time she kills Joel, and then you proceed to play as Ellie as she embarks on her vengeance mission. Then the game shifts. At a pivotal point, time rewinds to chronicle the same timeline but now from Abby’s POV, forcing you to play and survive as a character you spent half the game hating.

Mazin and his fellow showrunner, Neil Druckmann, a co-creator of the games, previously acknowledged why this wasn’t a viable option for a multi-season TV series. One reason is the nature of video games: “You play as Abby, so you immediately form an empathic connection with her,” Druckmann told a group of press at a press conference in March. Not so much with TV. The other reason is the timeline of production. HBO renewed The Last of Us for season 3 ahead of the season 2 premiere, but it won’t arrive until at the earliest 2026 (if we’re being optimistic). “If we were to stick to a very similar timeline [as the game], viewers would have to wait a very, very long time to get that context,” Druckmann continued. “It would probably get spoiled between seasons, and we didn’t want that.”

Instead, they utilized new material — like Dever’s dual Abbys — to form an empathic connection between the audience and this character earlier in the story. “Dreams are a recurring thing,” Druckmann now tells EW. “This was a nice evolution of that idea of seeing how it’s eating away at her.”

Dever gave a lot of attention to her physical performances as the two Abbys, from their postures to the way young Abby holds her gun to specific facial expressions. “Those two people are so different,” she explains. “I have a larger perspective now on what grief really feels like. You only really know what it feels like [when] you actually experience it in a deep, deep way.”

Dever shares that her mom, Kathy, died from metastatic breast cancer within weeks of filming her first scenes for The Last of Us, which happened to be the moment Abby kills Joel in episode 2. “I lost my mom two or three weeks before I actually shot this scene, and my mom’s funeral was three days before I did my first day,” she says. “So I was sort of in a fog. I was in a daze.”

Watching her own work as the two Abbys now as an audience member, Dever feels very different. “I just feel like I’ve been through such a battle,” she continues. “Talking about old Abby versus younger Abby, it is five years between those two people and they are different people. The training she had done when she was with the Fireflies versus five years later, that was all different. But, emotionally, she’s been through hell. And I wanted to make sure that was shown. You only have a short amount of time to be able to show that, really.”

In terms of the scene itself, Mazin wrote a monologue for Dever that isn’t in the Part II video game, and the actress delivers one of the series’ most poignant performances to date. In the minutes before Abby kills Joel, she tells him everything that’s been weighing on her. To Mazin, that kind of invention, of filling in the blanks of the game’s story, is the fun part of his job.

“It’s really just about imagining how angry she is and how hurt, but also how correct she is in her mind,” he explains. “What is important for her to convey is that what he did was wrong. The end. Guilty. Sentenced to die. No argument. No debate. No nothing. I do love how Pedro portrayed this kind of acceptance of it there. The truth is, what he did is what she’s doing now. We kill for the people we love. Joel has an experience that neither Ellie nor Abby have — and we’re going to explore this further in the season — and that is the experience of loving a child, which is different than being a child and loving a parent.”

“When I first read that, I was like, ‘Jesus Christ! That is something that we don’t see in the game,'” Dever remembers of her reaction to the script, “this very human part of her that has been struggling for so long, and she’s trying to find a way out of that struggle. But that is what is very similar to all of those characters, even in that room: all of those characters are just flawed human beings in a lot of ways.”

Because of her own grieving process, Dever wasn’t able to use her typical preparation process as an actor. “Usually if I have a monologue like that, I’m memorizing it three weeks before I do it,” she points out. “I had a different approach, and I think that it really served the character in a lot of ways. I was able to sort of… I don’t know, just really let it go and not think about it too much because the words on the page are so powerful anyway.”

Of course, Abby’s suffering doesn’t end when she kills Joel. Her crew — consisting of Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer), Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and Manny (Danny Ramirez) — all look on, some with abject horror, as she tortures him before driving the broken-off shaft into the back of his neck in front of a screaming Ellie. They then pack up their supplies and file out of the room to begin the long trek back home. It’s that moment in the snow, Dever says, you should pay attention to.

“We get just a sliver of this at the very end. Maybe this is something that people will notice or not,” she explains. “Because of the intense lead-up to the killing of Joel, how strategic she wanted to be with it, how she sat on it for so long, and how desperate she was for revenge…when she finally gets it, there’s a moment where her dad’s still gone and it doesn’t fix anything. So moving forward for Abby, we get to see how that manifests for her.”