HBO’s ‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2 Is Moving To A New Location

The Last of Us season 2 is packing up and moving somewhere else. It’s not jumping networks, of course, as one of HBO’s new crown jewels, but it’s moving filming locations.

Season 1 was shot in Alberta, Canada, which stood in for various locations in the US, and resulted in some city-based changes based on what they had to work with. But now Season 2 is leaving the province and heading to Vancouver, British Columbia instead.

If you’re played the second game you know why this is (no real spoilers follow), because a large chunk of that game takes place in a city just south of Vancouver, Seattle. So the idea is clearly that they will try to make one Pacific Northwest City double for another. As for why they’re still filming and Canada and not Seattle itself, well, thank Canadian tax breaks, certainly, which is why so much stuff is shot up there.

This move in location reinforced the already-stated idea that season 2 of The Last of Us is jumping straight into Part 2 of the game. I do wonder if some parts of the show will be filmed at the faux-Wyoming Jackson location they already set up, but that’s only needed really for a few scenes early on.

While the location move offered no addition plot details, there isn’t much to say as we know they’re following the events of the second game which take us to Seattle for reason I won’t get into just yet. In addition to this, Craig Mazin has already said that Part 2 of the game will probably require two seasons to get through, because of its size. Later, the game takes us to Santa Barbara, CA, for an extended sequence, and we’ll have to see if they can replicate that in Canada somehow, through a whole lot of TV magic.

If we’re starting to get information about changing filming locations, next on the list is no doubt some casting announcements to come. Easily, the most anticipated one is the casting of co-main character Abby, who should be a big presence in the next two (final?) seasons, and we still only have fan speculation, which is usually wrong, to go off of there. We thought we saw Dina in season 1 in Jackson, but it’s unclear whether that same actress, Paolina van Kleef, has the important role for season 2 as well. Recasting is probably easy, if they want to do it, given how brief a moment it was where we saw her.

Mazin and Druckmann have already promised that we would see a lot more infected in the second season, likely due to a bigger budget from HBO, and moving to a more urban environment here you’d expect to see more infected, as opposed to out in the wilds of America. But we’ll have to see what “a lot” of infected means. More to come.

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