This article contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” video games and for the TV series through season 2, episode 6.
It seems pretty straightforward to just ask, “How old is Joel Miller, the former protagonist of ‘The Last of Us?'” The answer is actually somewhat complicated, though, because the HBO TV adaptation fiddles with the timeline established in the video games.
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For starters, Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel in the show, is 50 years old as of this writing; his birthday is on April 2 and he was born in 1975. But the Naughty Dog game that serves as the source material for “The Last of Us” has a different timeline than the HBO adaptation, and as such, Joel’s age shifts slightly. Based on context clues and some direct references (like a remastered version on the PlayStation 5 that features Joel’s ID at one point), Joel is in his 30s in 2013 when the cordyceps outbreak begins in the game. The action then moves ahead to 2033, and we learn that Joel is 51 years old when we catch up with him.
In the series, Joel is turning 36 in the pilot episode, which is why his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) gets him a watch to celebrate. (The watch breaks during the initial onset of the cordyceps virus, which happens during said pilot episode, but because Sarah dies in the violent chaos, Joel wears the broken watch for the remainder of his life.) The outbreak happens in 2003 in the series, so the fast forward brings us to 2023, making Joel 56; there’s another time jump in season 2 of five years, so at the start of season 2, Joel is 61 years old.
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Joel’s journey on The Last of Us was marked by tragedy
I mentioned that Joel’s daughter dies in the very first episode of “The Last of Us” on HBO (and she dies in the same fashion in the video game). Before the cordyceps outbreak truly begins, Joel and Sarah live a comfortable existence, often flanked by Joel’s younger brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and it’s clear that Joel is a gruff but extremely loving and protective single father. When Sarah is shot by military forces as cordyceps turns people into vicious, bloodthirsty zombies — and immediately dies in Joel’s arms — it sets the stage for Joel’s entire journey, because his time on “The Last of Us” is marked by utter tragedy.
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That’s why, when Joel meets Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a girl with apparent immunity to the cordyceps virus who needs to be transported halfway across the United States, he’s resistant to forming a relationship with her at first, but it happens anyway. After rescuing her from a dangerous situation, he even calls her “baby girl,” using the same term of affection he used for Sarah. There’s no question that, by the end of season 1 of “The Last of Us,” Ellie and Joel are a unit. That’s why Joel, in a moment of conflict and crisis, decides to kill a hospital full of unarmed doctors and nurses and prevent them from performing a surgery that will kill Ellie but perhaps cure the cordyceps virus with her brain matter, thanks to her immunity. Joel’s choice comes back to haunt him later, but the point here is that, after a lifetime of hurt and sorrow, Joel chooses the person that he loves over the good of humanity.
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Joel meets a brutal end in season 2 of The Last of Us – but ‘returns,’ sort of
If you’re current on “The Last of Us,” you know that season 2 of the series hasn’t exactly been kind to Joel — though you absolutely could argue, as some of my /Film colleagues have, that he deserved it. After killing a bunch of Fireflies and absconding with Ellie, Joel lies and tells her that the group couldn’t find a cure and cancelled the surgery rather than fill her in on what actually happened, and this comes back to bite Joel in the butt in a huge way, to put it quite mildly.
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In the sophomore season’s second episode, “Through the Valley,” Joel runs into Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and saves her from an Infected horde after she gets separated from her group. When he and Dina (Isabela Merced) realize they’re trapped in a snowstorm and surrounded by the horde, Abby says that her friends are squatting in an abandoned house and they can all seek shelter there. Unfortunately for Joel, Abby knows exactly who he is … because one of the unarmed doctors he killed while saving Ellie was Abby’s father, and she’s been hunting him for the past five years. In the most brutal fashion possible, Abby beats Joel and ends up hitting him so hard that she breaks the golf club she’s using; with Ellie watching, she drives the jagged shaft of the golf club into his neck to finish him off. Ellie vows revenge as Abby and her gang leave Joel’s corpse behind in the house, and at 61 years old, Joel’s story comes to a bitter end.
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Though Joel “returns” in the second season’s sixth episode, “The Price” (in flashbacks, where we see even more about Joel and Ellie’s relationship and the divide that opened between them over time), Joel and Pedro Pascal have both left “The Last of Us” behind. If you want to watch his timeline on the series, it’s streaming on HBO Max now.
