‘The Last of Us’ actor spoils show’s big death for Jimmy Fallon

Jimmy Fallon was just reminded of one of the hazards of being a talk show host.

During Thursday’s interview with The Last of Us actor Young Mazino, The Tonight Show host learned about a major development that took place in season 2 of the HBO drama. It’s pretty impressive that Fallon had apparently managed to avoid news of the major plot point in the three-plus weeks since the April 20 episode premiered.

And, to be fair, he outright asked Mazino, who plays Jesse, to set up what had happened so far this season on the post-apocalyptic series. That’s when the spoiler emerged.

“Well, the two main characters, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced), are in a war zone trying to exact their revenge, because Pedro Pascal’s character, Joel, got viciously murdered by somebody from the WLF. It’s a military faction….”

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

“Spoiler alert,” Fallon broke in. “Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Gosh! Guess I don’t have to watch last week’s episode. Ah!”

He added a sarcastic, “Nice to see you, bud.”

Mazino apologized, and Fallon softened up.

“So I’m new to this whole thing,” the actor said. “I assumed everybody here had watched the show. Let me take that back. I’m just kidding. None of that happened! We’re actively just all trying to survive this post-apocalyptic, harrowing world.”

It was bound to happen. The shocking storyline takes place in the video game that the show is adapted from, but many viewers were taken by surprise.

Pascal himself told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published when the episode aired that he had always known his character’s fate.

“It’s not like they said, ‘Hey, we kill you at the beginning of season 2,’ but it was always an understanding that it would stay true to the source material in a specific way and that the, let’s say, practical and exclusive obligation would be for season 1,” Pascal said. “It was just a matter of how and when.”

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Weeks after being killed off, Pascal’s character made his first cameo from the grave in a flashback.

It’s the kind of Joel reference that fans should expect on the show from here on out, showrunner Craig Mazin told EW.

“If we’ve done our jobs right,” he said, “you’ll feel Joel there a lot.”

Hopefully, that offers some solace to Fallon.

Watch Mazino discuss the show’s spoilers with Fallon in the video above.