‘It's essentially an animatronic bucking bronco': Emma D'Arcy on the joys of dragon-riding and other ‘House of the Dragon' secrets
Don't worry, Emma, we've got you covered.
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Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen experienced some truly epic moments during Season 2 of the Game of Thrones prequel, including meeting up with Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) in secret, watching as Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) finally pledged his loyalty to his queen, saying goodbye to Rhaenys Targaryen (Emily "Eve" Best), and, of course, all of those scenes with the show's unsung heroes, the dragons. D'Arcy received a Golden Globe nomination earlier this year, and is now in contention for an Emmy bid.
Gold Derby: Rhaenyra risks everything to return to King's Landing for a secret conversation with Alicent, because she wants to try to stop the war. How intense was that scene to film?
Emma D'Arcy: It was a favorite scene of mine. Getting to act with Liv is one of the great privileges in my life. But as a result of such scarcity, there was quite a lot of pressure on it. You have two big, knotty dialogue scenes in which to house the whole of that relationship. It felt to me like we were being asked to achieve an epic scale within quite small, narrow parameters. It's very silly as well, because it's a high stakes environment, and I'm wearing a wimple. [laughs] I'd say that's more work for Olivia than it was for me, because she would have been the one looking at me.
As the performer, what was it like returning to those King's Landing sets? We don't see your character in that environment much anymore.
That set was a set unto itself, and so I didn't actually get to go back inside. At Watford there's a stage that's got the castle and the Red Keep in it. And that set held a huge amount of memory for me, because so much of Season 1 took place there, and it stays up, it doesn't get packed down. King's Landing is in Watford, and that's the stage that I've been longing to get back to, but I didn't make it during Season 2.
Fingers crossed for Season 3!
Thank you. Mine are firmly crossed.
Rhaenyra and Daemon were separated for much of Season 2, but they reunited in the finale where he pledged his loyalty. How important was that moment, for these two characters to finally have each other's backs?
It was kind of momentous, you know? Similarly with Olivia, what was quite striking about Season 2 is that the three of us were all atomized and separated. Having worked so intensely together in the first season, those relationships, both professionally and personally, become super important. They became the anchors and the landmarks that help you navigate these really epic shooting periods. Something I noticed last season is that Daemon and Rhaenyra can't really accommodate weakness in the other, so it's a reasonably limited relationship. But when they come back together, they've both traversed this huge journey, and they reunite in a position of confidence.
When Alicent and Daemon are gone, Rhaenyra finds a new anchor in Mysaria. How would you describe their relationship?
I totally agree with you that, in the absence of Daemon and Alicent, she seeks a new bond. She fundamentally can't survive as a sole agent. She has to pair, and pair really hard. Sonoya Mizuno is totally incredible, and there's something quite unusual about their relationship. The friendship and companionship of another woman is unusual. All of Rhaenyra's tools are designed to enable her to navigate and manipulate a male-dominated world. Those carefully honed skills all suddenly feel like dumb instruments in the face of another woman.
Your character is often seen high up in the sky, riding on dragons. Take us behind the camera. How do you specifically film a dragon-riding scene?
It's so incredibly fun! And I say this as a person who can be quite dour. I often dread those scenes, until I get there. To describe it, it's essentially an animatronic bucking bronco, six feet in the air. You're mounted up there, and there tends to be blue screen surrounding you. They program the "flight" of the buck, and you hold on, and two men with giant leaf blowers fire wind and air in your face. That is a bit like, if you remember as a child putting your head out the window of a fast moving car, and you can't quite your breath, and it's gleeful in the chest. A lot of the work for me was wiping the huge grin off my face, because it's a fairground ride that I get paid to go on.
One of the most emotional moments in Season 2 was the death of Princess Rhaenys. What was it like saying goodbye to a coworker and a friend?
Such a funny part of our job, this. It speaks to the strange real/unreal space that we live in, because death for me as an actor is fictional, but it does also tangibly mean that I won't see Emily Best on a daily basis, which is a deep sadness. There's a strange, murky overlap between the fictive and the real. Emily's the most amazing person, and the energy that she brings to set is totally unique, and you can't replicate it. I feel poorer for not getting to see her on a daily basis. That's the health warning on doing a job within the Thrones universe, because there is a high chance that you're going to have to say lots of goodbyes.Congratulations on your Golden Globe nomination earlier this year. What was that whole experience like?
It was amazing, and I was able to stay in my body a little more than the first time, which I hardly remember. My favorite bit was that there was an absolute crush of people on the carpet. It felt like everyone was late, and there was a great fervor to get through the photo bit to get inside. Every famous person I've ever seen was within a 20-foot square. It's a crazy environment, and one that my nervous system always needs a few days to come down from. It's a real head-spinner.
As a performer, what do awards mean to you?
I suppose, as a nonbinary actor, there's a side to it which helps. There's a visibility that comes with those things that is helpful, and certainly, I felt the lack of representation when I was a younger person wanting to act. It wasn't any great sob story, I just thought that they weren't compatible. So, it gives me great joy to be able to put a nice frock on and say, they're wholly compatible. You can be whoever and do this job, and there's space, and that's lush.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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Boston Globe
25 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Laura Loomer, Trump's blunt instrument
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up After her presentation, Trump barked to Waltz, 'I want all of them fired.' He dismissed the group and hugged Loomer on her way out. Wong survived the day, but six employees in Loomer's folder were ousted. Two months later, White House staffers scored a small victory. On June 11, Trump attended the opening night of 'Les Misérables' at the Kennedy Center. So did Loomer, who ascended the stairway to the VIP section, where the president awaited the curtain. But she was stopped at the top by a White House aide. Loomer insisted that she had permission to visit Trump's section. The aide held his ground. A Kennedy Center employee joined the scene. For several minutes, the employee and the aide blockaded Loomer's path to Trump. Finally, furious, she stormed back down the stairs. Advertisement But the slight has hardly deterred her from using her prominence on social media to promote her own take on supporting Trump's agenda. Last week, in an apparent reference to the entire Hispanic population of the United States, she expressed relish over the prospect of people being eaten alive while trying to escape the swampland immigration detention facility known as 'Alligator Alcatraz.' Advertisement 'The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now,' she posted on X. In one of more than a dozen interviews with The New York Times for this article, Loomer, 32, dismissed the notion that she was an interloper who lacked credible standing with the president. 'My point of access to the White House is Donald Trump,' she said. 'And that's really hard for people to comprehend.' Within the White House, Loomer is regarded as an uncontrollable and toxic force whose deep loyalty to Trump is tempered by her tendency to turn on almost anyone, even her allies. No member of Trump's inner circle in the West Wing would speak about her on the record. The same character traits that endear her to the president and lead him to call her several times a month — particularly her seemingly total lack of fear — make many top aides treat her gingerly, as if she might unpin a hand grenade. Advertisement She has filed a defamation lawsuit against comedian Bill Maher and HBO for Maher's suggestion on his show last September that Loomer was sexually involved with Trump. 'Just because a woman is able to get access to the president, and she isn't a millionaire and doesn't work for the Republican Party, she must be sleeping with the president?' she said in another interview. 'I don't like using the term, because I don't want to sound like a liberal, but there really is a lot of misogyny.' Still, Loomer acknowledges that the president is central to her life. 'President Trump comes first,' she says she has told her boyfriend, 'and if you can't handle that, then go find somebody else.' After one meeting with Trump in 2023, she wrote effusively on X, 'I love him so much.' Right-wing activist Laura Loomer speaks with Representative Abraham Hamadeh in front of a photo of President Trump at the Longworth House Office Building in Washington, June 5, 2025. GREG KAHN/NYT Trump, for his part, frequently praises Loomer, calling her 'a fantastic woman, a true patriot' at one rally and 'amazing' at another. 'She's got the same intensity Roy Cohn had,' said Steve Bannon, a podcaster who was a senior adviser to the first Trump administration, referring to the pugilistic lawyer who helped Trump become a player in New York decades ago. Loomer has taken great pains to make herself worthy of the part. She styles herself as Trump's preeminent loyalist, declaring on X last month that 'America First is whatever President Trump says it is.' And she's hyper-conscious of the value Trump places on appearance. 'Every time I go and see the president,' she said, 'I always buy a new outfit, because I want to look my best.' Advertisement Her growing celebrity was on display one evening last month, when she dined at the Capital Grille, a prominent Washington steakhouse, with a Times reporter and her lawyer, Larry Klayman, who had spent the day helping his client prepare for her deposition in the suit against Maher. In the crowded dining room, Loomer traded warm hellos with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, while James Blair, a White House deputy chief of staff, came to her table to give her a hug. Over dinner, Loomer recalled that just 15 years earlier she had been an overweight teenager who 'used to cry in the bathroom' because she couldn't fit in trendy clothes. At times, she said, her weight exceeded 200 pounds; now she weighs about 125. Picking at her scallops, which she ordered despite her fondness for steak, Loomer added, 'I've got to stay thin.' In interviews, Loomer took exception to what she said was the characterization of her as a 'conspiracy theorist and anti-Muslim activist.' Rather, she maintained, she was a person of considerable influence: 'On a daily basis, I communicate with the most powerful and wealthiest people in the world.' Both descriptions, of course, can be true. Loomer once posted a video on X saying that the Sept. 11 attacks were 'an inside job,' though she now says the post was misinterpreted. She routinely refers to Trump's defeat in 2020 -- the same year she lost a congressional race in Florida — as 'the stolen election.' After losing in a congressional Republican primary two years later, Loomer refused to accept defeat, explaining on social media that, 'YOU DO NOT CONCEDE WHEN THERE IS THEFT INVOLVED!' Advertisement Her anti-Islamic rhetoric has been even more prolific. She labeled herself a '#ProudIslamophobe' on Twitter in 2017, a year before the platform banned her for hateful speech toward Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. 'I don't believe Islam is a real religion,' Loomer said, claiming baselessly that the Qatari government was 'the biggest financier' of the Black Lives Matter movement. After Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, won the recent Democratic mayoral primary in New York, she warned on X that 'there will be another 9/11 in NYC and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame.' Her 1.7 million followers on her reactivated X account include Vice President JD Vance; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; Kash Patel, the FBI director; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and Stephen Miller, the president's chief domestic policy adviser. Republican political candidates clamor for her endorsement; last month Vance invited Loomer to meet with him in his office. Right-wing activist Laura Loomer writes a social media post in between meetings at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, June 5, 2025. GREG KAHN/NYT As she patrolled the halls of Capitol Hill one recent morning, armed only with a mobile phone, it was easy to spot the look of terror spreading on the faces of Republicans who crossed her path: Nobody wants to be the next lawmaker to be labeled a disloyal RINO, or Republican in Name Only, by Loomer. 'She's like a child wielding a loaded firearm called Twitter,' said Tucker Carlson, the right-wing media host, whom Loomer recently attacked on social media for criticizing U.S. military involvement in the war between Israel and Iran. 'I don't blame her. I blame the adults who take her seriously.' Advertisement Being feared more than loved appears to suit Loomer. 'I don't want to be friends with people,' she said. 'That's why I've got four dogs.' She lives with her rescue dogs on Florida's Gulf Coast in a modest red brick ranch-style rental, splitting the costs with her live-in boyfriend. One bedroom has been converted into a studio for her twice-weekly podcast, 'Loomer Unleashed,' which has 80,000 followers on Rumble. The walls are filled with photographs of herself in combative moments, including when she was ushered out of a House hearing in 2018 for disrupting the testimony of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. That freeze-frame seems apt for a person who remains defiantly outside the mainstream. She is still locked out of her original Facebook and Instagram accounts. She is under the binding terms of a settlement not to speak disparagingly about the Council on American-Islamic Relations and is paying the nonprofit $1,200 a month to reimburse it for legal costs and other fees after a lawsuit she filed was dismissed as meritless. (Loomer is suing her original lawyer in that case for malpractice and will use any proceeds to help pay her debt to CAIR.) She was denied a concealed-carry firearms permit in Florida. Loomer professes indifference. 'At the end of the day,' she said, 'I play for an audience of one.' 'If anybody is a victim, it's me' Laura Loomer, a far-right activist, gathers with other supporters of former President Trump outside the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Aug. 24, 2023. NICOLE CRAINE/NYT Loomer has spent most of her life searching for an audience of any kind. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, in a tumultuous household. When she was 11, her parents divorced. Five months later, one of her two younger brothers, who had already been hospitalized multiple times 'due to uncontrollable behavior problems,' according to medical records, attacked her mother and was placed in a government group home. A decade after that, the same brother tried to choke his father to death and was charged with aggravated domestic assault, although he eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser crime. By the time Loomer was 12, her mother had ceased playing a meaningful role in her life. Eventually a state court awarded full custody to her father, Jeffrey, a rheumatologist. In an interview, Jeffrey Loomer said that he saw only one solution to maintaining peace in the household, which was to keep the violent child under his watch while sending his daughter and youngest son off to boarding school. 'If anybody is a victim, it's me,' Laura Loomer said of her upbringing. She spoke of binge-eating and suffering severe anxiety and depression throughout her adolescence, as well as feeling ignored. 'I was subjected to a lot of adversities that a lot of other people would not have been able to overcome, and I'm proud of myself for that. I think I did a good job.' At the Orme School, a small racially and ethnically diverse coed institution in Mayer, Arizona, which had an annual tuition of around $38,000 and alumni including Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti, Loomer did what she could to fit in. She was manager of the football and rodeo teams and forged a warm friendship with her roommate, who was Black. But according to two of her former classmates, she began openly espousing anti-Islam ideas, insisting that the Quran taught its followers to be terrorists and that Barack Obama, then president, was Muslim. 'Laura often expressed extreme views,' one of the classmates, Hasan Barkcin, who was born in Turkey and is Muslim, recalled. 'I'd correct her, she'd say, 'OK, got it,' and then she'd go back to repeating the same misinformation.' Loomer said she first started thinking about Islam after the Sept. 11 attacks, when she was 8. She often justifies her attacks on Muslims by invoking her religion: Though she admits she's not particularly observant, she calls herself a 'feisty Jewess' and frequently wears a Star of David pendant around her neck. Her father said he disagrees with her stance on Islam. 'I am not opposed to any religion,' Jeffrey Loomer said in an interview. At Orme, Laura Loomer expressed the desire to be famous and aspired to be valedictorian, according to another classmate. She came close, but fell short, and was disappointed again when she wasn't admitted to Dartmouth, a school her father attended. Instead, she spent a semester at Mount Holyoke College and then transferred to Barry University in South Florida, where she majored in broadcast journalism, immersed herself in conservative politics and became the campus president of the College Republicans. Her campus activism drew the attention of James O'Keefe, the founder of the right-wing undercover media group Project Veritas. O'Keefe hired Loomer at the beginning of 2015, a few months before she graduated. Her first stunt for the group, in which she infiltrated Black Lives Matter gatherings and recorded people making unflattering comments about the Rev. Al Sharpton, netted a front-page story in The New York Post. But over time, her anti-Muslim rants began to catch up with her. By 2019, she was banned by every major social media network and even by car services Uber and Lyft after she posted that 'I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.' At just 25, Loomer had lost her megaphone and feared that her media career was over. 'It was a massive blow to Laura,' said Shane Cory, a digital fundraising specialist who assisted Loomer in amassing online donors to support her activities, which included handcuffing herself to Twitter's New York City headquarters with a yellow Star of David affixed to her clothes in late 2018. That same year Loomer relocated to Palm Beach, and in 2019 she prepared a run for Congress. Political neophyte though she was, she proved to be an energetic campaigner and fundraiser, enough so to win the Republican primary and gain Trump's endorsement. Still, she lost by close to 20 points in a deep-blue district in 2020 to the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Lois Frankel. She lost again in 2022, this time in the Republican primary in a different district, to the incumbent, Rep. Daniel Webster. Trump had refrained from endorsing anyone in the primary, which Webster won by nearly 7 points. Loomer claimed fraud and refused to acknowledge defeat. Webster's campaign said in a statement that she had 'lost all sight of truth and reality.' She emerged from the 2022 contest broke and despondent, but soon found two lifelines. One was the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, who began restoring banned accounts, including hers, soon after taking over the company. The second was a deal she struck with Rumble, a right-wing video streaming platform, that paid her $15,000 a month to make content with a Vero Beach, Florida, media company. Repositioning herself as Trump's fiercest advocate, she focused on attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who figured to be Trump's chief rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Over the next 18 months, her attacks were relentless; she once went so far as to suggest that the breast cancer experienced by Casey DeSantis, the governor's wife, had 'been over exaggerated in a desperate effort to get votes.' In February 2023, Loomer had just returned from staging a ruckus at a book-signing event for DeSantis when her cellphone announced that an 'unknown caller' was on the line. 'Hello Laura, it's your favorite president,' Trump said on the other end. 'I love what you did today.' It was the first time the former president had called her, and he asked her to come visit him in person. 'I was so excited,' Loomer recalled. Weeks later, she drove to Mar-a-Lago, Trump's club in Palm Beach, where Trump met her, accompanied by Wiles. The former president encouraged Loomer to take another shot at Congress. She demurred and said returning Trump to the White House took precedence. Trump turned to Wiles, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation, and said: 'Let's hire her. Let's put her on the campaign.' Loomer filled out a W-9 tax form and was told that her start date would be April 1, 2023. But April 1 came and went. The next week, the Times reported that Trump was considering hiring Loomer, and by the end of the day, a campaign official announced that the job offer had been withdrawn. 'I was so depressed,' Loomer said. 'I cried so much. I locked myself in my apartment for like a month. I lost like 15 pounds.' She has been outside looking in ever since. 'Pleasure in humiliating people' This March, Sergio Gor, the White House's director of personnel, called Loomer and asked her to pay a visit. Loomer was delighted. From her perspective, this could mean only one thing: that she was finally about to be offered a White House job. She booked a flight to Washington and met in Gor's office adjacent to the White House. To her chagrin, Gor wanted only to engage in small talk. Sitting in her hotel room, fuming, Loomer began digging into Wong's background, combing through websites looking for signs of disloyalty. Her best work, she said, comes 'in the aftermath of when I've been disrespected.' Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander of US Cyber Command, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 26, 2025. KENNY HOLSTON/NYT She then set her sights on two holdovers from the Biden administration, Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, and his deputy, Wendy Noble. Both were fired after her Oval Office meeting with Trump in early April. Weeks later, the White House withdrew the nomination of Janette Nesheiwat, the sister-in-law of Waltz, for surgeon general after Loomer savaged her on social media as 'not ideologically aligned' with Trump. It is hard to say how decisive a role Loomer played in these personnel decisions. Asked to put a number on the job casualties — which she calls 'scalps' — that she could take credit for, Loomer replied, 'I don't even know.' But she added: 'I really enjoy and take great pleasure in humiliating people who suck at their job.' Trump publicly denied that she had influenced his decision to fire the National Security Council aides, and White House officials have suggested that Loomer has tended to claim credit for work done quietly in the administration. But some close allies of the president believe that there are those in the government who have furtively supplied Loomer with information so she can do their dirty work of publicly disparaging certain personnel for them. Loomer spends at least 14 hours every day on her phone, scrolling through X, reading hundreds of incoming text messages, taking phone calls and pounding out lengthy posts. While researching a prospective appointee or a perceived adversary of Trump, she relies on basic online tools, including Google, LinkedIn, Instagram and the Federal Election Commission website. In her quest to find damning information, she will often focus on the subject's spouse and their children. For example, she seized on the background of the wife of Stanley Woodward, who has defended allies of Trump in court and is awaiting Senate confirmation to be associate attorney general. Loomer determined that Woodward's wife, Kristin McGough Woodward, was a lawyer who supported the Black Lives Matter movement. 'In any revolution, you do have a purity police,' Bannon said. But Loomer's influence has limits. Woodward is still on track for confirmation despite Loomer's protestations. She has not succeeded in dislodging Morgan Ortagus, the deputy U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, whom Loomer has personally disliked for years and has described as being 'all about self enrichment' and 'AMERICA LAST.' Stefanie Spear, the deputy chief of staff to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been accused by Loomer of being a 'Marxist' but she remains in her job. For that matter, Loomer said that she finds Kennedy to be 'a very problematic person' who 'is running a shadow presidential campaign' from his office. But Kennedy's job seems safe for the moment, as does that of Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom Loomer derisively refers to as 'Pam Blondi.' On Monday evening, Loomer posted on X that Bondi needed to resign for not delivering promised new information about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Today Loomer derives her living from the attention economy, gaining paying subscribers on X as well as donors from everyday provocations. On a hot Thursday last month on Capitol Hill, she and her employee Charles Downs accosted several members of Congress, shooting video as they asked them whether they would support designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Two House Democrats, Reps. Maxine Waters of California and Daniel Goldman of New York, did what they could to ignore her. A third, Rep. Ted Lieu of California, said that he would have to do some reading on the matter. Loomer separately tasked Downs with lying in wait outside a House committee hearing room for Omar, a holding pattern that consumed more than three hours until Omar finally materialized in the corridor. To Downs' repeated question about the Muslim Brotherhood, she responded, 'Enjoy your clicks, have a nice day!' Even many Republicans Loomer approached, like Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois and Andy Ogles of Tennessee, regarded her tentatively, as if she might just bite. She received a warmer welcome from Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. Loomer entered Mace's office with a beagle named Oliver rescued from a military testing laboratory to accentuate her recent success in persuading the Navy to halt such testing on dogs and cats. 'You'd be a hero,' Loomer said, urging Mace to lead Congress in designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Mace pledged to do so. Later, Loomer said that she and Mace 'have a mutual hatred of Marjorie,' referring to another close female ally of the president, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. It has not escaped Loomer's notice that many of her peers in the MAGA ecosystem have become rich. Recently, in hopes of improving her financial fortunes, she started a consulting business, Loomered Strategies, with a business partner in New York state. 'I'm kind of like pivoting,' she said. 'I do journalism, but also I'm now going to be doing a lot of advising in terms of opposition research, executive-level vetting and advocacy.' She says that she has five clients and that overall her activities earn a gross income of about $300,000. Even when working with clients, Loomer remains mindful of her primary audience. A rare slip came in May, when her anti-Islam impulses led her to criticize the Trump administration for accepting a luxury 747 from the Qatari government, which she labeled 'jihadists in suits.' Trump called her the next day from Air Force One en route to Saudi Arabia and, according to several people with knowledge of the exchange, conveyed his deep displeasure with her. She apologized in a lengthy post on X in which she also reminded others of her special access to the president: 'I know I could have probably just had a private conversation about the plane instead.' Loomer said that she has had at least four conversations with Trump since that time and is confident that their relationship is as strong as ever, despite continuing efforts by some White House aides to marginalize her. She is less sanguine about what lies ahead. 'I feel like Western civilization is in a death spiral,' she said, likening Trump with the lone source of light in an otherwise dark world. 'Eventually, a candle burns out. But it's a slow burn.' And once that dim source of optimism was snuffed out? 'I don't know what my life is going to look like when President Trump is out of office,' she said. This article originally appeared in .
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Forbes
‘The Last Of Us Part II' Just Got A Huge Update That Completely Changes How The Game Is Played
The Last Of Us Part II One of my biggest criticisms of HBO's adaptation of The Last Of Us Part II, which is being adapted into multiple seasons of TV, is the way the show bungled the chronology. One Season 2 scene in particular was plucked from the very end of the video game and inserted in the penultimate episode of the second season, long before it takes place in the game. Elsewhere, we learn much earlier what Abby's motivations are, whereas gamers were blindsided by her actions in the game, and didn't learn what fueled her revenge until much later. It appears that Naughty Dog wants a piece of this action. Sony revealed today that a new update for The Last Of Us Part II will allow players to blast their way through the game in chronological order. The free update takes the non-linearity of the game and untangles it so that players can play as Ellie and Abby chronologically. In the original game, you play as Ellie first and then the clock jumps back and you play as Abby. It's a really clever storytelling structure that forces you to examine a whole different side of the coin. In the Chronological Update, all of this is removed. You jump back and forth between missions, playing as both characters as they hurtle towards one another. 'Through the new Chronological mode, we believe players will gain even deeper insight into Part II's narrative," Naughty Dog informs us on the PlayStation Blog. "Players will be able to see how Ellie being gifted a guitar flows so neatly into her learning to play, for example, while the journey through Seattle will showcase the fascinating parallels between Ellie and Abby's crisscrossing journeys. You'll see just how close they come into running into each other, how their actions impact each other, and more. 'It was no small feat to bring The Last of Us Part II's story chronologically together, given that Part II's story is so meticulously put together. We're grateful to the developers both at Naughty Dog and our partners at Nixxes to make the Chronological mode as smooth as possible. And while we of course recommend players still new to the game to play through Part II's story as was originally developed, the team's hard work has paid off with a fascinating new way to enjoy this chapter.' While this is a pretty fascinating idea, and I'm certainly curious to see how (or whether) it works, it's hard not to shake your head at this point. This game and the original have both been released and re-released so many times at this point, a new update like this can start to feel like part of a running joke. The Last Of Us Complete released just a few months ago (with a physical Collector's Edition coming out this week). It's hard to see any new release – even a free update – without thinking about how much this franchise has been squeezed for every last penny. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Along with the update, which is out now on PS5 and PC, the game is getting new bug fixes and performance updates and two very familiar skins for brothers Joel and Tommy: Tommy and Joel Yep, these are Nathan Drake and Sam Drake skins from Uncharted to celebrate Naughty Dog's 40th anniversary this year. I sure wish a new Uncharted game was in the works. C'est la vie.
CNN
4 hours ago
- CNN
‘Superman' actor Wendell Pierce likens his seminal show ‘The Wire' to a ‘canary in the mine' for these times
Despite calls from far and wide for 'The Wire' to come back, actor Wendell Pierce is firm in his stance that the acclaimed show should stay untouched and in the past. ''The Wire' is something that is classic,' Pierce said at Monday's premiere for 'Superman' in Hollywood, adding that 'what makes it classic (is) it speaks to, it spoke to the audience then, it speaks to us now, it will speak to audiences long after it's over.' Pierce, who played detective William 'Bunk' Moreland in 'The Wire,' said he believes the drama resonated because of 'the cautionary tale that it was, the fact that it lets people know there's an ugly side of human nature.' 'We're seeing that demonstrated today. I mean as we stand here on wonderful beautiful Hollywood Boulevard, they have American secret police who raided MacArthur Park today with guns drawn on citizens for no reason,' he said. 'That's a dangerous thing.' Earlier on Monday, federal immigration agents in tactical gear accompanied by members of the California National Guard were deployed to the park near downtown Los Angeles. The operation sparked outrage among local residents and Mayor Karen Bass called it 'outrageous and un-American' and 'an attempt to spread fear.' 'That's why 'The Wire' is so poignant. It was a canary in the mine then and it's a canary in the mine now,' Pierce said. 'What kind of society do we want to be a part of?' Pierce starred on the acclaimed HBO series from 2002 to 2008 alongside Dominic West, the late Lance Reddick, Sonja Sohn and the late Michael K. Williams. 'The Wire' remains widely regarded as one of the most exemplary crime series on television. In 'Superman,' Pierce will take on the role of Perry White, editor in chief of The Daily Planet in Metropolis. The role was previously portrayed by Laurence Fishburne in 2016's 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.' 'Superman' premieres in theaters this Friday. 'The Wire' and 'Superman' both come from production companies owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, which also owns CNN.
