The Big Picture

The Ghoul is a bounty hunter roaming the post-apocalyptic world for 200 years, with a cynical and nihilistic worldview. The show aims to capture the dark humor of the Fallout games but does not rely on one-liners or zingers for comedic effect. Fallout remains relevant today because it explores themes of inequality and the survival of the human race, which are prominent in current times and make for entertaining and subversive storytelling.

At this year’s Comic-Con Experience (CCXP) in Brazil, Prime Video pulled the curtain back on their upcoming series, Fallout. The highly anticipated series is xecutive produced by Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, with a story adapted to the screen by co-showrunners and writers Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, the games take place in a post-nuclear war America where there are Vault Dwellers — those who’ve thrived underground and are unaware of what lies beyond their Vault-Tec vaults — and the survivors, mutations, and guilds that make up the irradiated Wasteland. According to Prime Video, the show takes place 200 years after the devastation in an “incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe.” The stars of the series include Yellowjacket’s Ella Purnell as Lucy, a Vault Dweller, Walton Goggins as The Ghoul, Aaron Moten as Maximus, a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, as well as Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, Johnny Pemberton, and Michael Emerson.

Before the group hit the stage, Collider’s Steve Weintraub was able to participate in a group interview with Goggins and co-writer and EP, Wagner. They talked about who The Ghoul is, where he came from, how he’s evolved in the world, and how the show zeroed in on the right tone when adapting the games to the screen. They also talked about the game’s humor, the challenges of adapting a video game, and the main characters on the show. Check out the full transcript below for more on Goggin’s influences behind his character, the relevancy of the show in today’s world, how the three leads help cover “thousands of hours of gameplay” in eight episodes, and more.

Fallout In a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, citizens must live in underground bunkers to protect themselves from radiation, mutants and bandits. Release Date April 12, 2024 Main Genre Sci-Fi Seasons 1

Who is Walton Goggins’ Character, The Ghoul?
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QUESTION: Walton, your character is a ghoul. In the theater we saw him as a savior and a survivor in the end of the trailer. What is the vision that your character had about the world after the bomb attack?

WALTON GOGGINS: After the nuclear war. The Ghoul, he’s a bounty hunter. He’s been roaming the world for 200 years. He is ruthless. He is not without morals; he has his own kind of moral code. He is pragmatic, he is devilishly handsome with a wicked sense of humor, but he has seen the lesser side of humanity. In some ways, he’s the great observer in this world and takes the audience through this journey. He’s cynical, deeply cynical about everything that he’s seen, but he wasn’t always that way, right? I mean, The Ghoul has a name and his name was Cooper Howard. I can’t really tell you too much about him, but the chasm between the two is vast. You’ll see it kind of retro-engineered, really, like why his worldview is his worldview. Is he a savior? Is he not a savior?

GRAHAM WAGNER: What we’re interested in is how can you make one man two completely different characters? And the answer is time. You have enough time and you’re gonna come out different. So, yeah, he is a cynic and he is nihilistic, but it’s earned, we like to think.

GOGGINS: Yeah, this is a great hero’s journey for all three of these people. It’s also a great villain’s journey. The antagonists and the protagonists change constantly in this story.

Will he be a character we love to hate?

GOGGINS: [Laughs] Well, I’ve played a lot of those. I hope that you love to hate him, but eventually maybe you love him. I don’t know. But I’m as excited about this as anything that I’ve ever done.

Will the Game’s Humor Translate to the Series?
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We saw on the trailer that there’s a lot humor specific to the Fallout series we have seen on the games, and you talk about The Ghoul being a little cynical and stuff like that. I would like you guys to talk a little about how it was to adapt this kind of humor for the Fallout series to fit in the game humor, but for television now.

WAGNER: I wouldn’t call this a comedy-forward show. I come from comedy, and I was probably the most annoying guy in the edit room, being like, “Take that out. Take that out,” because it’s science fiction. So, a suspension of disbelief is already an uphill battle. We’ve got a 200-year-old Ghoul without a nose; we’ve got a lady who lives in a home and all of her roommates wear blue jumpsuits together; another guy, he wants nothing more than to wear a two-ton power armor set and blow shit up. These are already pretty big ideas and I just don’t think zingers and one-liners help with that buy-in. So, we were pretty grounded because I think the conceit of the show is fundamentally humorous, which is what happens when you outsource the survival of the human race to a private corporation. Things get weird. We kind of felt like we needed to just service those darkly committed premises with pretty much a straight face as often as we could.

GOGGINS: Yeah, it’s absurdist, right? In a lot of ways it’s subversive, the themes that it really kind of talks about. It’s, I guess, winking at the audience through the violence as much as it is the comedy, but the comedy, as is in the game, for me is deadly serious. It’s situationally funny.

WAGNER: Yeah. There are no one-liners. There is not, like, “Look at me now, I think you should laugh.” I don’t know, for me, I think comedy…I’m mean, guys, Portlandia and The Office and Baskets and Silicon Valley, and all the rest of it. What I find funny is watching people in situations where, “What the fuck is going on right now?” And you’re a little on your heels. And that’s how I feel about watching this show. It was a hard tone, I think, for these guys to crack and for Jonathan to capture visually, but they did the hard work for us.

GOGGINS: At the core of it, I mean, there’s a lot of appeals to working on the show, I’ve been playing Fallout since 1997, Fallout 1 was a big deal to me, but on top of that, there’s working with the guy who made Westworld. When I come from sketch comedy, I was like, “What the fuck is that gonna look like?” You don’t want to take a job that’s just gonna be boring, and I just knew this was gonna be interesting, challenging, and we were gonna have to surprise ourselves to figure it out. On top of making a show about how a giant corporation brought about the end of the world on Amazon Prime! You know, [it’s] inherently a little spicy.

Why ‘Fallout’ Stays Relevant
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Why do you think it’s so important to tell a story like Fallout right now in these days?

GOGGINS: Well, first and foremost, I think that we are on the precipice of a golden age of game adaptations. Why do you tell any story at any given time? It’s entertaining. It is, again, subversive. I mean, it explores the difference between the haves and the have-nots in a post-apocalyptic kind of retro-futuristic landscape. We’re not the only show to explore those themes, but those themes are as prominent now as they’ve ever been, really. It’s not the first time that it’s happened, but we’re certainly living in those times. I think, to answer your question, for me, this is fiction, right? The end of the world hasn’t happened, but in some ways it’s nice to kind of live out those fantasies in a safe place. And for me, it was always about the story. I don’t question the timing of anything. I don’t know that anyone has ever questioned the time of anything that they’ve made unless it’s been a reaction to something. More often than not, great art meets a moment in time culturally. Sometimes it’s kismet, sometimes it’s by mistake. Sometimes the stars just align in that way.

WAGNER: I think you have to speak to that. We started developing the show three years ago before COVID, and suddenly, Geneva [Robertson-Dworet] and I, writing the show, were living as Vault Dwellers, and it became topical. It’s not why we wanted to do the show, but it became like, “Well, shit, this just became relevant in a different way.”

GOGGINS: There was an article in the Guardian about a tech writer who flew out to America in the West. Not to name any names, he was incapable of naming these names, but the conversation centered around building vaults in and around, whether it’s Joshua Tree or Death Valley, for this very thing! And we’re already deep into filming this, so it’s like, “What the fuck is happening right now?”

WAGNER: I mean, that’s just it. The game has been around since 1997. It pulled from a lot of sources, like A Boy and His Dog, Mad Max, and A Canticle for Leibowitz. These are themes that have been sort of churning around for a long time for a reason, it turns out, because they just keep popping up. So yeah, it’s part of the reason why Fallout kind of just, aside from the show, just keeps going and keeps getting second wins, third wins, and now it’s gonna, I think, keep going after this.

Congrats, the footage looked awesome. If Shane from The Shield, Boyd from Justified, Baby Billy from The Righteous Gemstones, and The Ghoul from Fallout all sat down at a table for dinner, who would be the first one taken out, and who would be the one to survive?

GOGGINS: Fuck. [Laughs] Baby Billy because he would get on everyone’s nerves. And the last person, the person that would never be taken out, and the only person that would walk away from that table is The Ghoul. Having just watched it, really. And this isn’t about me, this isn’t a commentary on my performance, just this character that these people wrote. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever participated in. In the story, and in my mind, he’s a legend. I mean, he is a very, very, very complicated guy, but in this story his reputation precedes itself. He’s about as dangerous, certainly more dangerous than anyone I’ve ever played. But I would hate that he would kill Baby Billy!

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WAGNER: That would be too dark. It would be very dark for even a post-apocalyptic show.

GOGGINS: But it would be a long time! I think that those people would have an incredible… You know what? I have those conversations with all of those people in my head daily. [Laughs]

Who Are the Three Leads in ‘Fallout’?
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So we have these really clear three leaders in the story, and they are completely different. I wanted to know, why did you decide to go in this direction and to have these so different and unique points of view to tell this story?

WAGNER: We talked a lot about The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as a way to kind of explore this world through three lenses, and sort of four lenses if you count the two lenses that your character carries [to Goggins]. I think it was really necessary, because the world is so massive, just to get more coverage on it. We only have eight episodes in the first season. There’s thousands of hours of gameplay. You can pick up Fallout 4 and find a new piece of lore in Nick Valentine’s cupboard. Even if you’ve played the games for years, it’s bottomless. So we just thought it was necessary to explore this world through the three different characters, three different worldviews, and sort of that old idea of, like, “Tell me your zip code and I’ll tell you what you believe.” That’s what we wanted to explore the most with this.

GOGGINS: “Tell me your zip code and I’ll tell you what you believe.”

WAGNER: I think it’s Karl Marx. The media training guy said, “Don’t say Karl Marx.” But I said it! I just said it, and I’m saying it again. I just keep saying Karl Marx. But yeah, it’s one of the truest things. We have a guy who is a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. What’s he gonna think of things? We have Lucy whose values are, like, hermetically sealed in a vault. She’s never seen the world. She just sort of has an idea of what kind of person she is. That’s interesting, too. And we have this guy who’s seen it all, over and over and over again.

GOGGINS: And that evolved over time for you as you were kind of writing.

WAGNER: Yeah.

GOGGINS: And watching it. I mean, being there, but seeing it, there’s so much work that we don’t get to see, right? Because we’re just in our world. I won’t tell you how that kind of crosses over, and I didn’t give anything away, I swear to god, Amazon. I’m not saying anything out of turn, but Lucy, Ella [Purnell’s] character, she’s so naive, and she’s eternally optimistic, and then, Aaron [Moten’s] character, Maximus, it reminds me of the [Cowardly] Lion. He’s just looking for bravery, right? He wants to kind of control and establish order in the world with the Brotherhood of Steel. And then The Ghoul embraces chaos, embraces the world the way that it is, and I was thinking, “These are three different theologies in themselves,” you know? Really. And if you combined all three of those ways of thinking, wow, that would be a cool god. If you kind of incorporate all of them. But we are very different in the story, and they are very, very different points of view.

Fallout is known for their famous and funny bugs and glitches. Will we have some references in the series about that?

WAGNER: I mean, I don’t wanna throw Bethesda under the bus and talk about glitches too much, but no. We didn’t really want to do what I kind of call meta humor. You know, there’s no save game, there’s no meta elements like that. We talked about it a great deal because some of my fondest memories of playing Fallout, I’d say it was daggerfall, which is a moment where I just bumped into the wall and fell off the map and watched the entire world fly away from me as I fell out. It was just transcendental and wonderful, and I was like, “Can we get this in the show?” Not in the first season [laughs], but it’s definitely on my mind as a concept. But yeah, we stayed clear of too many winks. Like I said earlier, we really just want people to buy into this world and not be pushed out of it because it’s a tall order. It’s a pretty crazy place and we just want to get people invested in that first before we fuck with it too much.

The Inspiration Behind The Ghoul
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Talking games again, Fallout seems to have a lot of characters that are similar to an outsider, cynical, a bounty hunter. I want to know if there’s any inspiration that you guys got from the games to write or to play this character, like someone from the games that inspired you to create The Ghoul?

GOGGINS: Well, first and foremost, this story is a lot of different things, right? It’s an adventure, it’s full of action, and it’s exciting, and it’s dark, but at the heart of all of it, the thing that I was taken with is it’s character-driven. It really is from these points of view, but it stays in the lane. You’re always learning something new about the characters because they’re always learning something new about themselves.

I didn’t play the game beforehand. I had heard about it. My son, he’s 13, it was a little bit before his time. He’s a big Bethesda fan, but he got into Skyrim – The Elder Scrolls. That’s his thing. And when we started having these conversations, he came in and sat down on the bed with me, and he said, “So you gonna download Fallout and start playing it with me?” And I said, “No. No, because I don’t want to be influenced by the game.” So for me, the time that it took for this application, it took a while…but I would watch a movie every day.

I’d seen a lot of these movies, but when I go to work, I like to kind of stay in that head and there’s a lot to kind of answer for who The Ghoul is now, and this man, Cooper Howard. So, I watched a lot of John Wayne – watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Rio Bravo and Stagecoach – and all of Clint [Eastwood’s] stuff with [Sergio] Leone…and Mr. [Henry] Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West, and then The Wild Bunch, just a lot of those things. And it’s like, “Oh, okay, I know all of these,” but even Butch Cassidy [and the Sundance Kid]. The Ghoul is a rascal, and I like being a rascal. His timing is impeccable. His worldview is predicated on the things that he’s seen for 200 years, so there is nothing naive about him, and that’s really kind of where I started it from, it wasn’t with the game. I knew that they would have my back.

WAGNER: And there’s a long time between now and April, so I’m trying not to spoil things for anybody. We didn’t start from a place of, like, characters from the games. We set things after. We kind of told ourselves this is Fallout 5. This is just another installation, and we’re starting with fresh snow. But as things go on… So again, I’m really desperate not to spoil stuff so I’ll leave it at that.

The Challenges of Tackling a Video Game Adaptation

You have spoken about the challenges of making the series, but what was the main challenge for both of you guys in this series as an actor and as a writer?

WAGNER: Well, like I said, I was playing this game in 1997, it was my first year of college. There’s a lot of Fallout fans out there who you can’t… The idea of pleasing everybody is an impossibility. But I had my three roommates who I played Fallout with, and I think if I can get those guys to like the show, that’s all I need. And they’re assholes, so it’s gonna be tough. But that’s the goal.

GOGGINS: I think for me, it was just that this is epic in size. There’s a lot going on in this show visually, and wanting to help this story as much as possible. The thing that I was most fearful of in the very beginning was the makeup, the mask. And not just the time that it took because I got used to that and we did it with a very dear friend of mine, but it was whether or not I could communicate everything that was going on inside of me with this extra layer of skin, if you will, if it would have impeded my ability to communicate with the people that I was working with. So, I think I was hyper sensitive about it at first, like, “Does any of this fucking mean anything to anyone?” And I was so isolated from people.

WAGNER: Yeah. One day we were shooting in the Super Duper Mart, and it was an early day of filming with you in costume, and I think the crew was afraid of you because you looked scary. That’s a tricky way to go to work, you know what I mean?

GOGGINS: That is a tricky way to go to work, and then you try to do your iPhone and it’s not recognizing you at all. [Laughs] But that was kind of the thing. And I kept leaning on Graham Jonathan and Geneva, really, like, “Do you see that it’s all here? I know what I’m going through, but does it just look like a doll face or whatever?” And they said, “No man, it’s all there. Everything’s reading.”

WAGNER: And a lot of that was the eyes, right? There’s is a lot of shit, but we left the eyes because that’s how you connect with this guy, and the teeth. I think that does 98% of the work right there.

GOGGINS: But they weren’t my teeth, Graham. Come on, man! You’ve seen my teeth.

Are There Plans for ‘Fallout’ Season 2?
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For each of you, can The Ghoul get shot? Can he take damage and regenerate, or if he gets shot that’s the end? Then, obviously Prime Video wants this to be a show that lasts for more than one season, and a lot of times as fans, we feel like creatives have just thought about the first season and nothing beyond. When you guys were writing and working on the show, were you sort of laying out any sort of bible or thinking about, “Where ultimately we want these characters to go? Do we have a three-season plan even if it’s not what we’re gonna follow,” but some sort of idea where you’re going?

WAGNER: We do. We really do. I don’t know how to talk about it, but I just want to assure you that we definitely do. I feel like we barely scratched the surface of what we even wanted to do in Season 1, so there’s so much more to do. I think a lot about the craziness of Fallout, and if we were just to confront everybody with it all at once, it would just be like tuning into Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, like, “There’s a demon on the couch and he’s just talking about a breakup. What is going on?” You know? It’s too much. So, we really are taking our time with this, and we really are stepping it up. Though, I think, at the same time, a whole lot of shit happens in the very first two episodes. So, it’s both crazy from a narrative perspective, but from a Fallout perspective we’re taking it very slow and we’re being patient because we have so much more to do.

GOGGINS: I don’t know how I can talk about powers.

WAGNER: It’s a tricky one.

GOGGINS: Yeah. Maybe there are no powers, maybe it’s just age? [Laughs] I can just say that.

WAGNER: He can take a shot to the… Shoot him in the leg and he’d be like…

GOGGINS: He’s a tough guy.

So, in connection to that, The Ghoul has lived for 200 years or so. What has he learned in that time and what do you think is his advantage?

GOGGINS: Wow. I suppose the truth about humanity and what we are capable of. I think that’s what he’s learned so far. Sometimes maybe he wishes that he didn’t know it but he does, and there’s a long way to go from where he starts and where he is now, and hopefully, ultimately, where he is going.

Fallout will premiere on Prime Video on April 12, 2024.

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