Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Last of Us season 2, episode 4, "Day One." The Last of Us isn't quite as cameo-heavy in season 2 as it was in season 1, but it does have a former Drake & Josh star. Josh Peck makes an unexpected cameo in the fourth episode, "Day One," playing an obnoxious FEDRA soldier who tells a crass story in the back of a truck during the opening flashback scene.
Photos from the set that Peck shared on Instagram confirm his character's name is Janowicz. "That was so fun," Kate Herron, the episode's director, tells Entertainment Weekly. "We had people read [for the part], obviously.
Josh's read came in, and Josh is fantastic. We were like, 'We need to get Josh.' But also the idea of it just being Josh…I love the idea we get to Drew Barrymore him in Scream.
People just wouldn't see it coming." The scene took viewers back to the Seattle quarantine zone in the year 2018 in order to set up the city that Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) walk into 11 years later. Janowicz told a story to his fellow FEDRA soldiers about three "voters" (the derogatory name FEDRA gave to Seattle citizens after stripping their voting rights) he stopped for disseminating pamphlets.
He called for backup, and a man named Greenberg arrived. Jeffrey Wright as Isaac Dixon on 'The Last of Us' season 2. Liane Hentscher/HBO "I caught them out here disseminating," Janowicz said.
"He goes, 'What? You f—ing perverts were out here splooging on my street?'" The story has a similarly inappropriate end after one of the voters tries to explain what disseminating means.
"Greenberg smacks his f—ing head against the wall and there goes his teeth, just blood f—ing everywhere," Janowicz relayed. "Greenberg goes, 'No one asked you, jizz boy.'" Janowicz and the majority of the other soldiers in that militia truck don't survive even five minutes after that inappropriate story.
Jeffrey Wright's Isaac Dixon, their commanding sergeant, decided to save one soldier, Burton (The Gilded Age's Ben Ahlers), before locking the rest inside the vehicle with active hand grenades. It's the moment Isaac betrayed FEDRA for the WLF (the Washington Liberation Front), the militia group he'll rise through the ranks to lead one day. "I feel like people that know the horror genre might work it out, they might be like, 'I feel like he might die,' but you wouldn't expect it," Herron says.
"Man, this was a tough secret to keep," Peck wrote on Instagram alongside photos he took of his time on set. "It was an honor to play a small part in one of my favorite shows, with one of my favorite actors ever." Season 2's first episode, "Future Days," featured a cameo from Gustavo Santaolalla, who composed the music for 2013's The Last of Us video game and its 2020 sequel.
Santaolalla appeared as one of the musicians performing at the Jackson town party. On the official companion podcast for The Last of Us, hosted by original Joel actor Troy Baker, showrunner Craig Mazin said the entire sequence with Isaac, Janowicz, and Burton "was inspired by a moment you have where you're wandering around in the game." Jeffrey Wright, Ben Ahlers, Alanna Ubach in 'The Last of Us'.
Liane Hentscher/HBO Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more. Neil Druckmann, the other showrunner and a co-creator of the source material, "put all these little moments inside the game, these little stories that are optional, people can find them or not," Mazin continued. "They are these notes that are left behind by some FEDRA officers who are long dead.
But you understood that in Seattle, there was a moment where FEDRA officers started turning on FEDRA because it was not working well, and that there was, in fact, a kind of internecine warfare." "There is a truck that you find that has been blown up with the people still inside as part of this uprising," Druckmann added on the podcast. "And so then in my weird head, I start thinking, 'Well, how did that happen?'"
Mazin said. The Last of Us continues to premiere new episodes every Sunday on HBO and Max.
