Last of Us Episode 5 required 65 prosthetics artists and a 6'6" stunt performer

gamesradar.com:

Spoiler alert: this story may include spoilers for HBO Max's The Last of Us so only proceed if you've seen Episode 5!

Thanks to the Super Bowl, the Last of Us episode 5 arrived early this week. And if you finished it wondering how on earth they managed to make that swarm of infected and Clickers look so horrifyingly real - not to mention that terrifying Bloater - HBO has pulled back the curtain with its latest instalment of Inside the Episode.

Whilst the phenomenal prosthetics work is detailed a little in the featurette, Variety gave us a thrilling behind-the-scenes peek at what exactly goes into bringing Naughty Dog's post-apocalyptic shooter to life, revealing that the 6'6" British actor, Adam Basil, playing the Bloater did so wearing an 88-pound suit.

“We had a whole copy of his body that we modeled the bloater prosthetics over in modeling clay,” prosthetics designer, Barrie Gower, explained. “We cast it out of a foam rubber and foam latex, which is very lightweight. It’s almost like an upholstery foam, a very spongy sort of material. That was all molded and cast in separate sections: top half, head, arms, legs. We had a team who fabricated all these parts together. We had a zipper up the back and around the waist that we could zip them together. He had all these pendulous folds of fungus which hid zippers and poppers."

"The suit would be very soft, but very slimy and wet,” Gower added. “We covered him in this gel-like solution, which gave him a gloss to all the fungus. We had lots of little spines and spiky hairs punched into his body, like little growths burrowing out. 

"To get the shapes to read, we had to cover them in a gloss. It was like a texture that we were building up, so we were constantly going in and