Walton Goggins Teases New Series ‘Fallout,’ Now Premiering One Day Early on April 10!
Remember the Cold War? Remember bomb shelters and McCarthyism and an all-around anxiety that the end of the world was near? Well, Amazon’s epic new sci-fi drama Fallout sure does. Set in an alternate reality where there is, in fact, a nuclear holocaust in the 1950s, the show capitalizes on everyone’s timeless fear that the world is about to come to an end.
Because, really, when hasn’t it felt like the world would come to an end?
Walton Goggins, who plays the ultimate villain you can’t help but sort of love (something he is very good at), The Ghoul, announced yesterday that the new series will be available one day earlier than fans were expecting. Now all episodes will be available on April 10th.
The end of the world is coming, just a little sooner than expected. FALLOUT, now arriving April 10 @ 6 p.m. PT. pic.twitter.com/9AcWR9uAqQ
— FALLOUT⚡️ (@falloutonprime) April 9, 2024
Though it is based on a successful video game franchise that began in the 1990s, if you haven’t played any, don’t worry: it is not a prerequisite to enjoy the show. It’s a unique post-apocalyptic tale exploring class and human nature that doesn’t hinge on knowing anything from the games.
Fallout does an incredible job of bringing to screen all of the worst possibilities one might imagine happening were the world to truly end in some catastrophic nuclear event. Yes, this is an unlikely scenario, but it’s not entirely impossible, which is what makes it so terrifying and so relatable. Remember Chernobyl? I grew up in Ukraine, so I sure do. Whereas Chernobyl mostly caused a massive spike in cancer and various other illnesses (the amount of women who died young in my hometown of Chernovtsy is truly insane), the radiation in Fallout causes some to live for hundreds of years in a mutated state, eventually turning them into something akin to a zombie.
Image courtesy of Prime Video
Fallout‘s world-building is on par with George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, and equally as impressive, with various factions surviving 200+ years after a major nuclear event: the secretive Brotherhood of Steel, an army-like group protecting the Wasteland, but with their own agendas; the vault dwellers, various communities living underground with their 1950s vision of life still mostly intact; among others. The show has its own set of rules, and so do the people who inhabit it.
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It’s not just a violent, post-apocalyptic thriller with enough levity to keep you watching if that’s not your thing; the show is saying something. On a deeper level, it’s about modernity, and the things society has left behind as technology has advanced. It’s also about human nature, and what people are capable of when presented with certain circumstances.
Walton Goggins agrees there is more to the show than meets the eye.
Image courtesy of Prime Video
“It’s a story about the cultural division between the haves and the have nots,” he told us. “In a post-apocalyptic world, you have vault dwellers who have a morality of convenience because they have all of their needs met and you have everybody else that was left on the surface to die. And it is a subversive absurdist comedy that has real consequences and there’s real drama when it lands. It is based on one of the most beloved gaming franchises in the history of gaming, and it says a lot about a lot. It’s a lot of fun. It’s an epic undertaking. We were in Libya, and Utah, and in New York, and a lot of people worked really hard to get it to the screen.”
Image courtesy of Prime Video
Goggins, who has not played the game Fallout and chose not to do so in preparation for the role, is not just a Ghoul in the series, but also a wise-cracking cowboy and former actor with a tragic past who is definitely meant to be an antagonist, and yet you can’t help but root for him at times. “It’s a complicated world and it’s hard to use a modern sense of morality and apply it to people that have nothing,” he said. “And you can judge behavior, but you have to contextualize that behavior. At the end of the day, I hope at least that the Ghoul, just like Cooper Howard, the other person that he is, is charismatic and has a wicked sense of humor. One is carrying a tremendous amount of pain after everything that he lost, but there is a connection between the two. They are both the same people.”
Goggins does an amazing job balancing whatever is left of his character’s humanity with the creature he has become. Like all great sci-fi, there’s a certain realism to it beyond the imagined world and its people, and nowhere is it more clear than in the character of The Ghoul.
“At the apex of Pax Americana, we all thought that this was it, man,” he continued. “The human problems were going to be solved. There was going to be a universal peace for a very long time. It just didn’t work out that way. It didn’t work out that way in this show and it didn’t work out that way in reality. Thankfully we’re not at that place now, but we certainly are in this story and it begs so many questions about what happens and what happens next. It is just a compelling story. This gaming world is being mined for a reason, because the stories are so compelling. I’m just grateful to be a part of it.”
Image courtesy of Prime Video
And how did Goggins feel playing a man without a nose? “I needed a lot of Kleenex,” he joked. “No, they took my nose out at post. So it was a five hour process in the beginning that we reduced to an hour and 45 minutes. [When I finally saw it], it was a little like, oh my God, what? Oh fuck. I’m so grateful for my nose.”
Who isn’t grateful for their nose? You’re not really you without your nose. (A theme at the heart of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” which also deals with the question of society and class — and a missing nose.)
Even if you’re not a fan of the game (I personally have never played it), Fallout is really a must-watch new series. It’s visually stunning and thematically layered; also, it’s just incredibly fun. Check it out on Amazon on April 10.
60s Sci-Fi Favorites
March 2020
Do you remember all the great Sci-Fi TV shows of the ’60s?
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