While Fallout returns to a dystopian wasteland for Season 2, Walton Goggins is aware of the video game-based series’ real-world parallels.
After he “spent a lot more time” in Cooper Howard’s origin story before becoming The Ghoul, the 3x Emmy nominee explained to Deadline that the character is “a reflection of all of us” as the world in the Prime Video show teeters on the edge of nuclear war.
“He has no control over the information that is coming to him, and he’s understanding in real time the world that he thought he knew no longer exists, and there is a chaotic kind of bent, if you will, to the world that he’s living in,” he says. “And he’s just like any reasonable person trying to make sense out of something that can’t make sense.
“This show isn’t political in the sense that the writers of the show don’t overtly stand on a soapbox and preach. … You’re a part of a story that just so happens to dovetail very nicely into what’s going on in the world around it, and it’s just about timing more than anything else, and that’s really kind of where we find ourselves in Fallout. Luckily for us, we do it with absurdity and we do it with satire, and then we do it with real consequences,” adds Goggins.
While The Ghoul ventures to New Vegas with Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) in the future timeline to find his wife and child, Cooper’s past reveals how he came to learn of the nuclear conspiracy that led to the downfall of civilization and resulted in the current dystopia.
Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins in ‘Fallout’
Prime Video
Quoting co-star Aaron Moten with a line that “resonated so deeply with me,” Goggins said, “Everyone in this show wants to change the world. They just have a different how.”
“It’s really like a pole position for where the show is, what it’s trying to say, and what the world of Fallout, the game, is saying,” he explained. “You have all of these warring factions, but not so dissimilar than the world that we live in today. People just have a different idea about what the solution is, right? We have it all individually.”
Goggins adds, “The Ghoul really is the only loner here. He just wants to be with his family. But all of the other tribes, if you will, they’re just trying to [rebuild society] their way, and I think that’s just what happens in the world. On the other side of a calamity, different political parties are formed, different affiliations are made, and and you just try to remake it the way that you want to see it run.”
Premiering Dec. 17 on Prime Video, new Season 2 episodes of Fallout are available to stream Wednesdays.