Gay Episode of The Last of Us Has an Unaired 2-Hour Director's Cut

#ReleaseTheHoarCut!

Directed by Peter Hoar, episode three of The Last of Us featured a heart-shattering gay love story between characters Frank (Murray Bartlett) and Bill (Nick Offerman). While the videogame series only alluded to Bill’s male lover and didn’t actually highlight their story as a couple, the HBO television series dedicated an entire episode to showing these two men falling in love.

During an interview with Deadline, co-creator of The Last of Us TV series Craig Mazin revealed that the original cut of episode three director’s cut from Hoar was much, much longer than what ended up airing on HBO Max. Mazin explained:

“Peter Hoar did his director’s cut with our editor, Tim Good, which was quite long. When they sent it to me, I think it was almost two hours or something like that. So, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s probably not good.’ And I sat down, but I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll watch the two-hour version of this episode.’ And I cried so hard that at one point, I actually said out loud, ‘Ow.’ I mean, it hurt. I cried so hard. It hurt. And I thought, ‘Well, if these guys can do this to me and I wrote this f*cking thing, then I think it might work pretty well on other people.’ Now, we did work really hard to, but we knew we couldn’t put a two-hour version of this thing out there.”

When pressed to say more about this longer director’s cut, Mazin noted that it was probably for the best that they had to cut the episode to its 72-minute runtime. He remarked:

“We didn’t quite have the luxury of that, I think, but HBO was kind enough to let us go a bit long. And look, I never want to overstay my welcome. I always want to leave people wanting more. But this is a longer episode, and what’s really interesting is, even though I think it’s like 73 minutes long, so many people who have seen it have said that hour flew by. And I’m like, ‘It wasn’t just an hour. It was 1 hour and 12 minutes.’ And so that’s, I think, a real achievement. But it was really when I saw Peter and Tim’s cut that I just thought like, ‘Wow, this one got me right here.’”

Mazin is making some sense here, but we can’t help but feel curious about watching the full two-hour cut of this incredible gay episode of The Last of Us. Release the full thing, HBO!

The Last of Us airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

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