Peter Hoar gives people inside large genre stories time to matter. We rate his patient, intimate television highly, especially when a relationship the main plot could hurry past proves worth an episode of its own.
Fi1m perspective
In the third episode of The Last of Us (2023), Bill and Frank's life together is given room to matter for its own sake. Hoar stays with their relationship long enough for affection to become believable, rather than merely something the script tells us is there. We were moved more than we expected, because the programme let us spend time with two people it might otherwise have hurried past. The episode makes a persuasive case for expanding a game when adapting it for television. It also gives us the clearest reason to seek out his name in the credits.
Much of his work has been inside programmes with rules already in place. A Doctor Who episode in 2011 opened the way to American work, including Daredevil (2016). He directed the pilot and first-series finale of The Umbrella Academy (2019). On Russell T Davies's It's a Sin (2021), he took charge of all five episodes. That longer stretch matters for a director so interested in letting relationships develop: he could sustain that attention across a whole series.
The work with Davies matters because It's a Sin asks him to sustain joy alongside tragedy across five episodes. Hoar's working methods include storyboarding intimate scenes and trusting instinct on set. That is a sensible way to approach scenes whose success depends on people seeming comfortable with one another. The affection in The Last of Us feels unforced, and we never feel that Bill and Frank exist only to make us cry.
The caution is that a television director cannot take all the credit for a script's willingness to linger. Our reservation about The Last of Us was that some other supporting characters needed more space than they received. Hoar's episode shows how much the programme gains when it gives them that space, though we would not prescribe the same detour for every story. Watch The Last of Us from the beginning; his episode is worth arriving at properly.
Biography
Peter Hoar is a British film and television director. He studied Media Production at Bournemouth University, graduating in 1992.
Hoar is known for directing all five episodes of the 2021 Channel 4 series It's a Sin and the episode 'Long, Long Time' of the 2023 HBO series The Last of Us. His other credits include episodes of Doctor Who (2005), Marvel's Daredevil (2015), The Umbrella Academy (2019) and Altered Carbon (2018).
He has won two BAFTA TV Awards for Director: Fiction, for It's a Sin and The Last of Us, and received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the latter.
