Hollywood North Buzz: THE LAST OF US Season 2: Nanaimo as Seattle’s Capitol Hill From Game
An E Olive Way scene from the popular game
Capitol Hill has helped these people find exactly the partner they deserved in the reality TV show Love is Blind and starred as part of the cast’s home turf in a season of MTV’s Real World.
Next year, Capitol Hill will serve as part of the apocalyptic wasteland that backdrops the second season of The Last of Us,
But there will be a stand-in.
Canadian industry tracker Hollywood North Buzz has posted pictures and a few details from the sets where production is currently underway in a Nanaimo, British Columbia transformed to represent the overgrown apocalypse of Capitol Hill abandoned to the zombie-creating, mass fungal infection at the center of the video game-inspired story.
HNB reports:
In real-life, Capitol Hill is a diverse district centred around Volunteer Park where Seattle’s gay community and others enjoy local cafes, high-end restaurants and stores. But The Last of Us takes place 20+ years after a fungal pandemic turned infected people into monsters aka fungus zombies and pitted survivors against one another.
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The report says the film crew is busy transforming Nanaimo’s Skinner Street “adding murals and frayed and weathered Capitol Hill banners circa 2003, the year modern civilization came to a halt.”
According to the Last of Us Wiki, Capitol Hill was a part of “Seattle’s downtown area prior to the Cordyceps brain infection outbreak” and features prominently in the Last of Us II storyline where the Wolves of the Washington Liberation Front have driven off the Federal Disaster Response Agency. Points of interest include Aurora Books, Bagel Bros, the Bank of Meridian, Capitol Inn, Coast Petroleum, Melody’s Flowers, Nancy’s Knick Knacks, Olive Street Market, and Daydream Cleaners.
Thanks to decades of tax breaks and the growth of industry professionals and resources, B.C. continues to kick Washington’s ass when it comes to “Hollywood North” aspirations. CHS reported here last spring on City Hall’s efforts to attract new film, television, commercial, and streaming projects to Seattle including a new 11-member commission.
In the meantime, a city of around 100,000 people on the inland-facing side of Vancouver Island is standing-in for Capitol Hill with stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey and the cast and crew scheduled to work at Canadian sites through summer.
According to HBO, The Last of Us Season 2 is planned to premier sometime in 2025.
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Argh! Such a shame this won’t be filmed here! When I moved to the Hill in 1990, Seattle was crawling with actors and film crews. It was so fun and exciting! Never understood why Seattle let all that business slip away…
We (smartly) don’t compete with the massive tax giveaways by politicians in other locations to the movie companies. These are multi-billion $$ corporations and don’t need our charity.
Also we don’t get large parts of our city shut down.
B.C. Was a good choice. At least the contestants will be treated like people when they walk down the street.
Some of the “Capital Hill” structures have also been built in their Burnaby, B.C. studios.
They could have filmed on actual Capitol Hill. With some of the buildings and zombies around here no CGI would be needed!