How The Production Designer For HBO's The Last Of Us Built Episode 7's Mall
The latest episode of HBO's The Last of Us included content from the first game's Left Behind DLC, where we learn how Ellie was bitten, but also shows us her first understanding of true, inconsolable loss. During this part of the game, Ellie has to fend for herself as Joel recovers from being impaled on broken glass, but also we flash back to her life before Joel and we see a slice of life as a teenager during the end of the world.
Ellie's best friend and crush Riley, played by Storm Reid in the series, sneak out to an abandoned mall where the two have an evening that's a quasi-date and get to live as teenagers did before the cordyceps outbreak. Tragically, the two are attacked and bitten by a formerly dormant Clicker. This is where Ellie finds out she is immune but also loses the person she loved most in the world.
Getting a mall built to recreate this moment wasn't an easy feat, but production designer John Paino was up to the challenge.
«We got to pick and create these stores. It was great to use their logos, and we could play with what they are, the luxury stores, and the codes behind them,» Paino told Variety, as he went through the process of building a mall. «Creating the creepy American Girl store was fun to make.»
Paino was aiming to find an American-style mall in Calgary, Canada, where the show is filmed, but they ended up repurposing a dead mall, Northland Village Mall, which closed in 2021. Paino recollected his time in his youth at his local mall and how it made him feel as a kid.
«I'm a child of the '70s, and the mall was a temple. The size of 10 football fields. I'd spend a lot of time there and in the video arcade,» explained. «So, we were hoping to find something like that. We found an abandoned mall
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