One of the things I love most about my job is the connection. Anyone who knows that I write about and talk about TV shows and movies for a living is immediately excited to tell me about the thing that they’re watching, that they loved, that moved them…that did the thing that entertainment is supposed to do.
I don’t think I’ve had more people wanting to talk to me about something that the deeply loved, that moved them, more than the “Long, Long Time” episode of The Last of Us.
The HBO series, based on the popular video game, had largely followed its source material’s narrative before, in this episode, pausing to zoom in on a love story that hadn’t been fully explored. In the show, it was the gorgeous relationship set against the backdrop of the zombie apocalypse between two characters played by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
I spoke to Bartlett for the new episode of Obsessed: The Podcast, and knew, especially based on how many people had been so desperate to talk with me and unpack their feelings about the episode after it aired, that we needed to talk about it. (Watch it here.)
If so many people had reached out to me about it, after all, I couldn’t imagine what it’s been like for him.
“It’s been incredibly beautiful and very, very unique,” Bartlett told me. “Like, I’ve never really felt something like a response like that.”
The episode pauses the intensity of The Last of Us’ zombie action and paints a delicate, rounded portrait of a middle-aged couple, two men who are so clearly in love and devoted to each other, as they work to survive the high stakes of the all-encompassing dystopia. It’s just that: a portrait of love. That it’s two men is incidental. But, in that, it’s especially profound.
“Those two people could be any sexuality, any gender,” Bartlett said. “They happen to be two men. It’s just a gorgeous, gorgeous love story. It’s so beautifully conceived that everyone seemed to respond to that, not about who these people are. That it’s this gorgeous love story, and it doesn’t matter what bits they’ve got and how they identify.”
It’s also remarkable because, let’s face it, a horror thriller on an HBO series that is based on a video game is not necessarily the arena in which you would imagine a nuanced, sensitive gay love story to be given that kind of time and attention. It was transgressive, but also educational, exposing people to characters and a romance they otherwise may never have sought out or ever seen.
“It completely takes you by surprise, that love story encased in this amazing, scary, sort of post-apocalyptic video game kind of world,” Bartlett said. “It disarms you. So before you have a chance to judge it, you’re thrust into this story and feeling this love story, before you can build up walls or defenses against it because it’s so unexpected.”
He has noticed tenfold what I observed: just how much the episode moved people.
“There were a lot of women who responded by saying, I looked over and my husband, who’s never watched a gay love story, was just bawling,” he said. “Many, many, many, many stories like that. That’s what you want to do. Nudge people’s minds and hearts open, or blast them open. So feeling that we were able to do that with that story was just awesome.”
Bartlett’s romantic partner in the episode, Nick Offerman, won an Emmy for his performance. Because the world is what it is, naturally, not every response to the focus on a gay couple in the very macho-charged series was celebrated. There was the expected blowback from people who felt like they didn’t want to have same-sex love thrown in their face when all they wanted was to watch the zombie series.
Offerman had words for those people, which Bartlett loves to applaud him for: “Nick Offerman said this in his acceptance speech for the Emmy, which he so deservedly won, that people say I’m not interested in in a gay story. And he says, it’s a love story, asshole. It’s a love story.”
I first became entranced with Bartlett as an actor when he was starting in the discourse-spiking HBO series Looking. We talk about that reaction, and also about the incredible streak of TV series he’s starred on since, winning an Emmy for The White Lotus (he has a great story about that, um, rimming scene), being nominated for Welcome to Chippendales, and now playing a villain in Apple TV’s buzzy Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.
Watch the full interview here, or listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.
