Kaitlyn Dever’s spider bite required CG edits on ‘The Last of Us’: ‘It started to ooze’

For the first time Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby appears on screen in The Last of Us season 2, the crew needed to employ some unexpected visual effects to fix a pretty glaring detail.

During a Thursday night appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the show’s standout performer divulged how she was bit on her cheek by a spider, which left a nasty mark on her face just before the actress had to fly to Canada to film the opening shot of episode 1, “Future Days.”

“I got a spider bite right before I had to shoot this scene,” Dever tells Kimmel, as shown in a clip from her appearance on the late-night talk show (shown below). “I think it happened in my sleep, in my home in Los Angeles…. And I had to fly out to go do this other scene,” she added. “I felt so bad. They to had to edit several shots of me with this on me.”

The scene was a flashback to a young Abby kneeling by the graves of her father and the other Fireflies who Joel (Pedro Pascal) gunned down in defense of Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in the previous season. It’s the sequence when she turns to her crew — Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer), Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and Manny (Danny Ramirez) — and declares their mission to hunt down the responsible party.

The spider-bite mark remained on Dever’s face “for a few weeks,” she says. Though she felt bad for the producers, knowing how much VFX costs to edit something like that out — “It was like thousands of dollars per shot,” Dever remarks — showrunner Craig Mazin assured her it was covered by insurance.

“In that scene,” she continues, “it started to ooze and then exploded.” Watch the portion of her Kimmel interview at the 4:12 mark in the video below.

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This scene wasn’t the first material Dever shot for The Last of Us. That happened to be a rather spoiler-y moment that fans are still talking about to this day. Dever spoke exclusively with Entertainment Weekly about that scene alongside her costars Pascal and Ramsey.

And now, after another narrative twist in the season 2 finale, it looks like we’re going to be getting a lot more of Dever as Abby in season 3 of the HBO drama. If you know, you know…

“There is another side to this story that we have yet to really delve into,” Mazin teased to a group of reporters at a press conference. “There’s no question that Abby is the hero of her story. Kaitlyn Dever is the hero of a story, always. If you have a Kaitlyn Dever, you use a Kaitlyn Dever. So I think where we go next, all I can say is it will always be centering somebody, whether it’s Ellie and Dina, or whether it’s Abby and Abby’s relationship with Owen or new relationships. If you played the game, you probably know what I’m talking about. But if you want to boil it down, everything is under the cloud or sunlight of Joel, what Joel did to Abby, and what Joel did for Ellie. That will never change.”