KUALA LUMPUR, August 4 — It’s been a year since HBO’s The Last of Us premiered.
The series, a live adaptation from a famous video game of the same name, starred actor Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, is set in 20 years after the fall of modern civilisation in 2003, due to a mutated fungus that infects and zombifies humans.
The nine-part series made waves from its premiere, praised for its faithfulness to the source material.
Its second episode Infected created a buzz in South-east Asia as it featured Indonesia as the possible ground zero of the killer fungi outbreak.
It helped that it also briefly featured legendary Christine Hakim as Professor Ratna Pertiwi, a mycologist from the University of Indonesia in the opening scene, which also served as a prelude to the zombie fungus outbreak.
Despite her short screen time, Christine as Ratna gave audiences a chilling performance as she becomes among the earliest to realise how alarming the situation is after dissecting a body, and ordering a city-wide bomb in an effort to curb the outbreak- which unfortunately comes too late.
The award-winning actress, known as the grande dame of Indonesian cinema told Malay Mail that she almost turned down the role back when it was offered to her in 2020 as filming took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, and she was reluctant to leave her mother and her husband to head for the shoot in Canada.
“I have to fly for 24 hours alone, I can’t bring my manager or assistant or my husband and I have to undergo quarantine for two weeks alone.
“My mom was 86 years old at that time and my husband is a heart patient and diabetic, I can’t leave my responsibility as a daughter and as a wife behind and I said to my manager ‘no’ because what if something were to happen to me or to them within that time.
“It's not like I’m shooting in Yogyakarta, it was in Canada,” she said.
Christine said that it was her husband who convinced her to take up the role a month later.
“My husband told me ‘Christine, dont worry about me, don’t worry about Oma (mother), I will take care of myself and I will take care of Oma, because this is not only for you, this is for Asia.
“After my husband reassured me, as a wife and a Muslim, I felt the burden on my shoulder was gone and I called my manager the next morning and said okay to the role,” she said.
The 67-year-old said that upon seeing the episode, she realised that it was also a metaphor of sorts as the mind-decaying fungus represented the ‘social viruses’ ruining society today.
Christine’s role in The Last of Us came after she starred as the main antagonist in Joko Anwar’s horror film Impetigore (Perempuan Tanah Jahanam), her first villainous role in her 50-year career as an actress.
The Last of Us was not Christine’s first involvement in Hollywood as previously she also starred in the 2010 rom-com Eat, Pray, Love as a Balinese jamu seller with actress Julia Roberts.
