Nick Offerman's wife Megan Mullally convinced him to do The Last of Us: 'You have to do this'

We have Will & Grace star Megan Mullally to thank, in part, for that emotional rollercoaster of an episode from HBO's The Last of Us.

Nick Offerman appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night and told the host that it was his wife who gave him the final push to play Bill on the show.

Offerman previously told EW that he initially didn't have time in his schedule to take on the part of a prepper who finds love with a survivor Frank (Murray Bartlett) after the world falls apart in the face of a fungal plague.

"I'm a huge fan of [series co-creator] Craig [Mazin], and so I knew, 'Here's a script from Craig and it's for his new show and it's going to be something very special,'" he said in a January interview. "It was in a time when I didn't have time to go do it, so it was this immediate dilemma. I didn't even want to read it."

Fortunately, Mullally — Offerman's "incredible goddess of a wife" — read the script and urged him to do it. "She said, 'You're going to Calgary, buddy. Have fun! You have to do this,'" he shared with Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmel showed Offerman tearful video reactions viewers have been sharing on social media after watching the episode, which was a contained story about Bill falling in love with Frank and finding happiness together despite the unforgiving world around them.

"It's a tsunami of wonderful, generous plaudits," the actor said. "The episode began airing on Sunday. We had 6.4 million viewers, and HBO… they are so not f---ing around that they send me on the Jimmy Kimmel show on Wednesday to cull the stragglers. They're like, 'The 17 of you who haven't seen it yet, you're in for a treat.'"

Offerman told EW that he felt a kinship with the Bill character when he read the script for the first time.

"He can weld and build and fabricate anything. I'm like that to a much lesser degree. I love to make things," Offerman said. "Part of that competence, that sensibility, I think, is fear based. It allows me to feel like I'm in control of my immediate surroundings, so nothing bad's going to happen to me. I can never die because I can build a roof. I think for maybe both Bill and I, that's a way that we protect ourselves from having to feel things."

The Last of Us airs Sunday nights on HBO and streams on HBO Max.

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