LOS ANGELES >> “Give Sarah my love.” Spoken in a voice inflected with exhaustion and grief, they’re the only words that Tommy, played by actor Gabriel Luna, is able to muster to his brother Joel (Pedro Pascal), whose lifeless body lies shrouded on a table in a makeshift morgue in Jackson.

For this scene that opens Episode 3 of the second season of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” Luna says he tapped into the grief that he’s experienced over the years after losing close family members, including his grandfather in 2013.

“I remember being the only one in that chapel, walking up to my grandfather’s coffin, and that’s what I had in my mind when I was shooting the scene … the young lady gives me the rag to wash [Joel’s] body, and she exits. Now I’m the only one in there,” he says. “But as I’m walking up to Joel’s body, that’s what I was thinking of — my grandpa and being the only one there.”

“I’ve been to a lot of funerals in my life, so it felt very familiar,” he adds.

Luna and I meet to talk about his role in the postapocalyptic series at Bludso’s BBQ on La Brea Avenue. It’s two days after Episode 2 has aired, and he knows the shockwave it has sent to viewers.

QThere’s been a lot of reaction to Episode 2, where we see Tommy hold the fort and Joel die. Have you been following it?

AIt’s been a tornado of a couple of days. I was at WrestleMania when the episode aired. I left … a little early to catch a flight, and when I landed, my phone was absolutely lighting up like a Christmas tree, just everyone calling and saying, “Oh, that was amazing. Congratulations.” When you read the script, you knew that there was potential there for it to be something extraordinary. Then when you got there on the day — we spent almost two months shooting the second episode with Mark Mylod, our amazing director of [shows such as] “Succession” and “Game of Thrones.” And then, of course, Craig Mazin and Neil [Druckmann], the geniuses behind the whole thing.

You start to see it come together. We might actually be doing something that’ll go down in history, not just the big battle sequence, but also just the iconography of that Joel scene at the end. All those things together were gonna make for a seismic reaction, or at least I hoped shooting this a year ago.

.For me, it’s unforgettable. I still think about those moments. Craig Mazin once said, “You know, this is the one that they’re going to remember us for.” I think he was right. And if this is one of the major things I’m remembered for — I couldn’t be more proud.

QDid Craig and Neil talk to you about the divergence from the video-game storyline for your character? [In the game, Tommy is with Joel when he’s killed.]

ATowards the end of the first season, I told them, “It always rubbed me the wrong way that Tommy was knocked out, completely incapacitated during Joel’s murder. Is there a possibility that we shift things around?” Craig’s like, “You know what? I got an idea.”

Right before the strike in 2023, Craig sends me a big, long text, explaining how it all is going to go down, how Tommy is replaced with Dina at the scene of Joel’s murder, and is now in Jackson with his wife, Maria. The entire town is trying to survive this onslaught and originally, in the text, there’s like two or three bloaters. We shot it as if we were being attacked by two or three. We had to shave a lot of it down. I just got goosebumps reading it. My heart was beating just reading this text.

The fact that this change was made based off of input from me and talking to Craig and everybody else — maybe they had designs of doing that before, but I just love them so much for being so open to the possibilities.