The ‘Last of Us’ Season 2 Costume Designer on Favorites, Ellie’s Journey

“The Last of Us” Season 2 finale debuted on Sunday night. Taking place more than three decades after a Cordyceps outbreak ravages the world, the series charts where lead characters Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) find themselves in the years following the events of Season 1. Ann Foley, the costume designer for the series, took on a larger scale collaboration with other departments and more to make Season 2 come to life.

“The volume of actors, whether they’re background, stunts, principles, that we had to dress was a little crazy,” Foley told WWD. “I think episode 2 alone we did close to 600 fittings between Jackson, the infected and all of the W.L.F. at that point,” she said, referencing the safe haven city, zombie-like creatures, and militia group in Season 2. Episode 2 of the Emmy Award-winning series chronicles an epic attack, as infected try to break through the walls of Jackson to wreak more havoc.

Foley and her team mostly worked on costuming for the infected characters. “We had multiple units running — a unit running in Alberta [Canada], a snow unit, and then we had the Jackson unit as well. I had a massive crew that was brilliant in every sense of the word to help pull off the logistics of an episode of that size,” Foley said.

The task set before the two teams was to merge the idiosyncratic costume choices with the ornate makeup effects, showing the progression of how the two elements grew into one.

“We work really closely with Barrie Gower who creates the Cordyceps pieces for us,” Foley explained, calling the working relationship between costume and makeup departments ‘a beautiful collaboration.’”

“[Gower] and his team are absolutely remarkable in what they do. And then it’s our job to incorporate those Cordyceps into the costumes and show this breakdown of the Cordyceps coming through the clothes, blending into the weave, whether it’s the cotton, whether it’s the denim, whatever it might be,” the costume designer said.

Gower was instrumental with Foley’s team throughout the process. To transform the infected creatures into believable threats, Gower “helped us with all of the research of different types of fungus and mold and how they affect fabric and the weaves of the fabric, and how it comes through and starts breaking everything down. It’s really fascinating. We really wanted to make sure that we took the cordyceps to the next level in Season 2, at least with the integration into the costumes,” Foley said.

Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the creators behind the TV series adaptation of the popular video game, emphasized for Foley and Gower how much they wanted to see the “integration” of the costumes and deadly fungus. “They wanted to see the Cordyceps coming through and breaking down the weave of the clothes, which was really fascinating.”

The process could sometimes take up to 10 days for certain iterations of infected, like the horrifying clickers. Though shocking and horrifying, “they’re absolutely beautiful,” Foley said. “It can be quite disturbing to look at, but it’s art.”

The horror, however, extended beyond that makeup that made these onetime humans look so menacing. Foley and her team wanted to ground the infected characters as much as possible, giving each creature idiosyncratic costumes that spoke to their backstory before the 2003 outbreak and beyond.

“In episode 1 with the stalker [creature], she’s in a Gap lace floral blouse that you could potentially give to your mom for Mother’s Day,” Foley said. “It’s one of those blouses that’s very relatable. When we put it on the stalker, it became very real very quickly. You could relate to this person. This could have been a mom shopping in this market before this all happened in 2003. I think that that is such a great way to tell a story about the infected — making sure that they all sort of have their own individual look to them.”

While the infected remain the menacing draw of the “The Last of Us,” it’s the surviving characters the series follows that presented even more opportunities for Foley and her team to get creative, namely in the brands they worked with.

Foley took inspiration from the late ’90s and early 2000s for all the costumes, saying of the series, “the timeline of our show has [production of] clothes stop; they’re not made after 2003,” she said. “I wanted to focus on brands that I knew would’ve been around during that time and if they weren’t I wanted to make sure they had a timeless quality.”

Foley incorporated pieces by Aviator Nation, Levi’s, Converse and Carhartt into the costume designs for the characters. One Aviator Nation jacket, worn by Isabela Merced’s Dina, provided visual language to tell the audience about her character. “I had it on my mood boards initially for Dina just for a vibe and then both Craig and Neil were immediately drawn to it on the boards. And that’s when we started conversations about timeline. They were both incredibly supportive of, this might not be in our timeline but it’s a great, perfect jacket, piece of costuming for Dina,” she said.

Other costuming details may have gone unseen by the audience, even though Foley and the cast knew they were there. Foley provided actor Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie, with a pair of Converse “early on in prep. Craig and I had talked about it: 19-year-olds and what they do with their clothes sometimes and a pen. Ellie is big on doodling in her journal anyway.”

Foley gave Ramsey the sneakers, a pen and let the actor go about their process to merge the costume piece with the lead character. “The end result was really wonderful,” Foley said. “I never asked Bella what any of that meant because it was just between Bella and Ellie and they turned out fantastic. I absolutely love what Bella did on them.”

As Season 2 draws to a dramatic close, Foley reflected on the fruits of her respective team, the makeup department and her own labor over the course of the series.

“Costume designers are storytellers,” Foley said. “We’re here to help inform the audience about who this character is through their clothing, through their costumes. Helping the actors find their characters through their costumes is a real honor.”