Upgrading the Bloater: How ‘The Last of Us’ Made a New 600-Pound Monster for the Flamethrower Battle

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 2 of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” now streaming on Max.

The bloater is back and better than ever!

The biggest and baddest infected monster from “The Last of Us” made his triumphant return from Season 1 in the fiery Jackson battle Sunday night and went toe-to-toe with Tommy (Gabriel Luna), who wielded a sputtering flamethrower. Tommy won the fight, but the bloater did a number on the settlement and its residents before getting burned to a sizzling crisp. The super-sized clicker was first seen in Episode 5 of Season 1, but the Season 2 bloater may look a bit different this time around.

In Season 1, a towering 6’6” stuntman donned a slimy, 80-pound suit to play the bloater, only for his performance to be replicated with CGI for the episode. For Season 2, VFX supervisor Alex Wang and his team started creating a new bloater from CGI starting on day one.

“That gave us time to prep, understand and design the bloater,” he said. “We didn’t want to change the design too much, but we needed to give him an upgrade and make sure that the audience understood that this not the same bloater that we saw in Season 1. We needed to make him feel look bigger and taller. We redesigned his crown, because we found that the silhouette of the bloater is very important. With his head shape and the way that the Cordyceps sprouts, it almost gives this crown shape on his head, which is really spectacular for us to make him look more menacing and more like a king.”

The Cordyceps creature breaks through the Jackson wall, and leads hundreds of clickers and runners into the town before facing Tommy. The normally slow and lumbering bloater turns agile and frantic once Tommy shoots flames onto its fungus-covered hide.

“You see this in nature a lot, where big animals, say an alligator, move around really slowly and you think they’ll never move fast,” Wang said. “But pinned in the corner or in attack mode, they can gain speed. They actually can be fast, and that’s the frightening part about the bloater. We wanted to convey that through motion. Yes, he is slower, and 600-plus pounds of muscle and fat, but if he needs to be fast, he will be fast. When he was getting burned by the flamethrower, he feels endangered. This is desperation. He’s never gone through this pain. What does a bloater look like when he’s being burned? We went through many, many phases of different animations, starting with slow and then medium-fast.”

Wang used “The Last of Us Part II” gameplay as a guide for how the bloater would burn, in addition to references from nature. Before getting flame-roasted, the bloater was also a more purple and dark blue color, in addition to the red and orange, since he originated from the frigid Wyoming mountains.

“What does it look like when organic material, like vegetables and mushrooms, is being heated at a high temperature?” Wang said. “There’s a lot of bubbling. The skin starts to contract and crack then bubble, and liquid comes out. Those are all the types of things that we wanted to to have in the bloater. He’s hard-shelled and almost like a tree trunk. Once you penetrate through that, it will contract and then you expect there to be almost flesh, but we had to develop and understand what the layers of the bloater were once you burned off the first layer. It was important that we saw a progression of his burn, that it was realistic, interesting and that we as the audience believed that the flames worked and it wasn’t a coincidence that the bloater just suddenly died.”

After his debut in Season 1, the bloater became an unexpected “sex icon” and “big daddy mushroom,” as explained by stunt performer Adam Basil, and was the inspiration for many memes. So how does this new bloater’s sex appeal compare to the original?

“I would say for the design of the Season 2 bloater, we always try to make the physique interesting,” Wang said. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘sexy.’ That’s probably going too far, but I would say when you see him, you have to be intimidated. You have to feel frightened. So, big frame, he stands tall, he’s not crouching over. We had to make sure that he looked confident and that nobody’s going to mess with him. So, yeah, those design aspects are still definitely in Season 2.”