Fallout B eloved video game reimagined for TV
Self-described ‘despicable character’ Walton Goggins opens up to Shaun Bamber about playing a relatable bad guy and just how he thinks the world might end.
From crooked cop Shane Vendrell on The Shield to Justified criminal Boyd Crowder, acclaimed character actor Walton Goggins has stepped into the shoes of more than a few killers in his time.
Heck, the guy once even tried to kill Santa Claus, playing assassin “Skinny
Man” opposite Mel Gibson in the
2020 film Fatman, perhaps the only Christmas movie to feature a torture-by-electrocution scene.
And yet no matter how deplorable these characters of his might be, there’s something about Goggins that infuses them with likeability, with the idea that deep down these aren’t such bad guys really.
Rogues, reprobates, scoundrels and scallywags, these are his stock-in-trade, his bread-and-butter – but all with the tip of a hat and a tilted grin, as if to say, “Come on now. I can’t be that bad, can I?”
If you’ve ever wondered just how he does it, playing these angels with dirty faces or devils touched by the divine, the secret to this marvellous balancing act is that Walton Goggins is just being himself – or at least that’s what he told me.
“I, Walton Goggins, am a despicable character.” He waits a beat, then adds with a chuckle, “That some people like. Or at least have empathy for.”
“I think there’s a throughline in there that has to do with loneliness though” he continues. “For a lot of the people that I’ve played, being a bit misunderstood.
“Or maybe it was something as simple as those were the roles I was given, so I’ve got to find the humanity in them, and I was given the opportunity and the latitude to flesh that out. I think that’s just inherent in telling anyone’s story. Human beings are complicated.”
Wearing a light-and-airy white shirt to match his wide and dazzling grin, face framed by that slightly wild shock of hair, Goggins is in Los Angeles when I talk to him, on the promotion trail for his upcoming new TV series Fallout, based on the popular video game series set in a post-apocalyptic United States.
The original game – which has spawned several successful sequels and spin-offs since its initial 1997 release – starts in the mid-2100s, roughly a century after a global nuclear war has devastated modern civilisation, leaving survivors to seek refuge in underground fallout shelters, while others on the surface make do with what’s left behind.
The TV show follows more or less the same lines (although “the gap” is now more than 200 years), beginning fittingly with a title card reading simply, “The End”, and it’s here that we first meet Goggins’ character Cooper Howard – later to be known as The Ghoul – shortly before the bombs start to drop.
It should be clarified that, even before the beginning of the end, the world of Fallout is not quite the world we know in real life.
Visually spectacular, the first episode has a retro-futuristic aesthetic reminiscent of Disney’s Tomorrowland theme park, with a little bit of Mad Men and The Incredibles thrown in for good measure.
“This world is as if Pax Americana and The Jetsons never stopped – that it was realised,” says Goggins. “It’s at the height of American optimism and can-do attitude, on the other side of World War II.
“It feels like 1950s America, you know, at the height of America’s potential. It’s nostalgic, in a dark, strange, twisted way. And satirical – because it’s set in that time, it makes it even easier for it to be so absurd – and subversive.
“That’s what they did with the game and that’s what we try to do with the show.”
Essentially, the story of Fallout is the story of what happens after life as we know it ends – so how does Goggins think the world might end? What will be our tipping point?
“Any number of things could take us down, I guess,” he says. “I hope to God it doesn’t happen, but it feels like if it were to happen, it would be a lack of natural resources, and scarcity – for water, or for food – that will bring out the worst in us.
“Morality – more often than not – is predicated on ... having enough to share.
“It’s when those resources are dwindling – and we begin to protect what is ‘ours’ – that the worst seems to come out in all of us. I just hope it doesn’t happen.”