A beloved video game series comes to the screen in Prime Video’s Fallout. The actors playing Hank and The Ghoul get stuck into the post-apocalypse with Clarisse Loughrey.
Fallout: Season 1
“I think every movie that I’ve been a part of, they’re their own unique world, right?” Fallout star Walton Goggins tells Flicks. “This is no different. It just happens to be a beloved game for hundreds of millions of people. No pressure!” Yet as he and his co-star Kyle MacLachlan explain, their own inexperience roaming the wastelands of the long-running, post-apocalyptic video game series, first unleashed in 1997, made no difference when its behind-the-scenes creative team had worked to perfect its distinctive mix of pitch-black satire of American exceptionalism and survival thrills. “So for us, people that hadn’t been exposed to the game, we just brought an element of questioning the validity of these stories. You need someone to to question these things that aren’t just beholden to the mythology of the show.”
Goggins plays a bounty hunter, known only as The Ghoul, a zombie-like, radiated mutant who’s been wandering around the place for two centuries. “The thing that I keep coming back to is, why? Why is he still alive?” the actor says. “Why, after seeing everything that he’s seen, for two-hundred years, understanding everything that he lost when those bombs were dropped. In some ways, he’s seeing it for all of humanity.” MacLachlan, meanwhile, features as Hank, the overseer of the underground Vault 33, where the rich have sheltered ever since America was obliterated in a nuclear war with China—someone where, as the actor hints, there’s “definitely there’s more going on than meets the eye”.
