I attended the Fallout press junket to hear more about the anticipated new series from Prime Video. During our quick chat with the filmmakers, I also got a chance to see the new trailer, which is linked below. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
“He’s the poet Virgil from Dante’s Inferno!” Walton Goggins exclaims.
“He’s pragmatic and ruthless. A bounty hunter with his own set of moral codes, and a wicked sense of humor.”
Goggins tilts his head and flashes a mischievous smile. “Much like me.”
It’s that promise of dangerous charm which has come to define Fallout, the game series popularized by Bethesda. Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, each installment tells the stories of Vault Dwellers – those who survived the war underground – and the descendants of those who stayed above. It’s a violent, brutally unjust world, where compassion is a rarity.
Which makes Goggins’ character, The Ghoul, such an interesting prospect. He isn’t just a survivor of the wasteland, but of the war itself. Left mutated by the nuclear blasts that destroyed the world, The Ghoul has endured for hundreds of years in the wild. Now, he remembers that which all others have forgotten.
Like Virgil.
“He’s the bridge between both of these worlds,” Goggins explains. “To understand him, you have to understand the man before the war. How he went from Cooper Howard to this vastly different person.”
Ella Purnell plays Lucy, the Vault Dweller, who steps out into the wasteland at the start of the series.
“She’s essentially a newborn baby. She hasn’t had any real life experiences. All she knows is what she was taught and what she’s read in books that she has in the vault. It’s limited. And then you put her on the Wasteland, and, you know, what happens? What happens with that? That’s a really exciting for me to start,” Purnell says.
Countering the pragmatism and naivety is Aaron Moten’s Maximus. A member of The Brotherhood of Steel, who has joined forces with the oppressive group for a reason.
“Maximus is a person who’s lived in the Wasteland for his entire life, and he has a certain type of moral ambiguity that is forced upon him. How do you hold onto what is your unique, pure self, and how do you discover what it is that you want? That starting place excited me.”
Showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet agrees on the moral ambiguity of the wasteland.
“I’m a dual citizen of the US and New Zealand, and we often talk about how those care countries that are sort of celebrated as these wonderful, peaceful utopias, and “What if everyone was like there,” and the reality is not everywhere is like those countries. But what would it mean if those countries were to open their borders and let everyone in, and everyone could have a better life? Well, they would change, right? They would be the same. So, we saw the vaults as basically a mirror to that. This idea that, “What if we create a vault that is very peaceful and wonderful?” But what does it mean when not everyone gets to live there, and people suffer on the surface?”
For the production team, capturing the look and feel of Fallout became as important as the lore itself.
“We talked a lot about the power armor and the tone. That was a big thing,” executive producer and director Jonathan Nolan says.
“I think the tone was maybe the most challenging and the most intimidating thing for me. But working with Geneva and Graham, you knew that we were going to be in an excellent place with their incredibly ambitious story. On a technical level, the scope of the world, and the power armor in particular, it was one of those things you go, oh, how on earth are we going to do that? But we got there.”
Says Robertson-Dworet: “We couldn’t be more grateful to our incredible production designer, Howard Cummings, who just poured his whole soul into this. Arriving on set every day was like Christmas morning. I think that is something that Jonah has brought to all of his projects, this impressive eye for meticulous detail. Every detail has to be perfect, and so much of it we made physically on-set.”
“Then there’s the unbelievable tone, which is, as people have talked about, this unbelievable blend of action and comedy and just weirdness. But I think it’s also these incredibly prescient themes. Factionalism being maybe the most obvious. When you play [the game] Fallout, you go from settlement to settlement or from faction to faction. And that was something that we were really excited to manifest with our heroes. Ella being the Vault Dweller, Aaron being the Brotherhood of Steel member, and Walton being sort of the character that nobody really cares about; the ghouls in the wasteland. But in a way that makes them the most empathetic.”
Luckily, Fallout is a very funny franchise. Even if the humor is inherently bleak.
“I think you also have a moment that we’re in right now, in which the world seems to be evermore frightening and dour. So this was an opportunity for us to work on a show that gets to look that in the eye,” Nolan explains.
“We get to talk about the end of the world, but to do it with a sense of humor. I think, honestly, there’s a thread of optimism woven into the show. For us, it is a bit of expiation to be able to work on this every day.”
Fallout streams all episodes on Prime Video, April 11, 2024.
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