Video-game adaptation ‘Fallout’ crafts a ‘chaotic’ morality tale
Adapting a video game into a TV series seems like an obvious move for Jonathan Nolan, a longtime gamer who spent summers in Florida as a kid playing Atari and Nintendo with his older sibling, Oscar-winning filmmaker Christopher Nolan. And while Jonathan’s big bro, the director of “Oppenheimer,” could probably make a heck of a movie out of “Pong” – one of their childhood faves – his younger sibling has a much more fun job visiting the gonzo, post-apocalyptic world of “Fallout.”
“It was one of those games that just didn’t follow the rules, didn’t want to sit down and play nice,” says Jonathan Nolan, executive producer of HBO’s “Westworld” and Amazon Prime’s new show “Fallout.” He loved the chance to tackle the parallel landscapes of a game with a signature 1950s retrofuturistic style: the utopian underground luxury vaults that held people who could afford to keep themselves safe from a nuclear holocaust, and the irradiated, Western-tinged wasteland above ground that spawned a wild, lawless society.
Set 200 years after the Great War decimated Earth, the series follows three characters with converging storylines: Lucy (Ella Purnell), a “Vaultie” who ventures out of the only home she’s ever known and finds the surface an absurdly deadly place; Maximus (Aaron Moten), a lowly squire in the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel who’s in way over his head; and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a mutated, noseless outlaw who’s as dangerous as he is complicated.
“It feels like ‘Dr. Strangelove’ meets ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ sometimes,” Goggins says, adding he was
drawn to “the juxtaposition between the haves and the have-nots” and themes of morality and privilege. With the real world “so chaotic, in some ways we find comfort” in this post-apocalyptic narrative. “It’s almost like schadenfreude. It’s like, I just want to look at somebody else’s problems, and I can’t take my eyes off of it.”
Here’s what you need to know about the three colorful main characters of “Fallout”:
Ella Purnell’s Lucy finds independence leaving Vault 33
Lucy represents “the audience surrogate” because each “Fallout” video game starts with a character down below, says Nolan, who directed the show’s first three episodes. Purnell’s unlikely action hero is “apparently virtuous, somewhat naïve, untested – all the morality there is in theory, but you understand she’s actually pretty tough.”
Like the others, she’s been raised to marry and procreate because Vault dwellers’ eventual mission is to return to the surface and rebuild America. But underground life isn’t always what it seems, and Lucy has to go to the wasteland for an important mission.
“There’s so much more to her than meets the eye, and she gets constantly underestimated,” Purnell says. “She doesn’t necessarily want to leave the Vault. It’s her duty. She feels like she has to, and she has this sort of burning desire, this burning need, and it really becomes the making of her.”
Aaron Moten’s ‘Fallout’ character embraces knighthood
Lucy quickly discovers the wasteland is an unruly place, and the Brotherhood uses special-ops soldiers in impressive power armor to maintain order. Bullied by fellow recruits, Maximus battles his superior but winds up in the armor himself and sees his mettle tested as he navigates a messy landscape.
Moten thought about being a knight of the wasteland – “What’s glorious and what’s noble in this moment?” – but ultimately found inspiration in Cassius from “Julius Caesar.”
“Shakespeare describes him as a hungry dog at one point,” Moten says. He wondered what it would be like for Maximus, born and raised in the wasteland, to “have a different moral compass than (the world) that we all live in, one that’s filled with a different sort of Rolodex of right and wrong. That was really fun.”
Walton Goggins pulls double duty with the freaky Ghoul
Goggins’ character straddles both timelines of the show, as the unnerving Ghoul in the rough-and-tumble present and as the man he used to be, former movie idol Cooper Howard, in flashbacks to a pre-doomsday past that Nolan describes as “this bizarro Eisenhower-on-steroids America that never quite gave up its swagger.”
“I had to understand who Cooper Howard was before I understood who the Ghoul was. I had to know everything that the Ghoul lost in order to understand the pain that he carries throughout his life,” Goggins says. “Just like every human being, you change over time because you’re exposed to the trauma that we all experience and the joys that we have in our life. But I wanted there to be a continuity between these two people. The sense of humor hasn’t changed,” nor has “the charisma that was inherent in Cooper Howard that allowed him to do what he does back in a world before the bombs dropped.”