How The Last of Us Came to Life on HBO

How many times were you rendered speechless by what the The Last of Us looked like?

Because our jaws positively dropped when Ellie crossed between two dilapidated structures—the ruins of Boston all around her and Massachusetts Bay in the distance—in a scene the ambitious HBO series borrowed from the award-winning 2013 video game.

Only, that was Bella Ramsey really on a plank, traversing a set built from the ground up to bring the haunting story about survival in a world destroyed by a zombifying fungus (and human tyranny) to life.

“She walked across that 2-by-6,” production designer John Paino told E! News in an exclusive interview ahead of the show’s March 12 season finale. “That was built in a parking lot. They’re coming out of the museum, that roof is built, they’re crossing that, and the other [wall] is built—obviously only six or eight feet off the ground.”

The scenery beyond Ramsey is green screen, the three-time Emmy nominee noted, but everything the actors were walking on, riding through, climbing over, exploring, etc., throughout the show was the real deal, down to the last immersive detail.

You “could go up to a wall,” Paino said, “and if you touched it, you might have slime all over you.”