Fallout Interview: Walton Goggins & Graham Wagner Discuss World-Building & The Last Of Us Comparisons

Prime Video brought its upcoming video game adaptation, Fallout, to CCXP in São Paulo to unveil the teaser trailer for the first time. Based on the Fallout video game franchise, the show is set in a world similar to Earth that has been devastated by nuclear warfare. Written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia), the sci-fi series incorporates the lore and dark humor of the video games and has been confirmed to be part of the universe’s canon, but it tells an original story.

The teaser trailer for Fallout introduced the main protagonists, who each represent classic tropes from the video game but have backstories that are unique to the show. Lucy (Ella Purnell, Yellowjackets) is a naive Vault dweller who ventures onto the surface wasteland for the first time, Maximus (Aaron Moten, Emancipation) is a Brotherhood of Steel soldier who has only known the ways of surface life, and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins, Righteous Gemstones) is perhaps the show’s most mysterious character. He was a human named Cooper Howard before the apocalypse, but the hundreds of years since have altered him in ways that are more than physical.

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While at CCXP, Screen Rant and several other media outlets participated in an interview with showrunner Graham Wagner and star Walton Goggins. The duo shared what they thought made Fallout stand out, especially in the wake of The Last of Us‘ success, and how they approached the character of The Ghoul.

Graham Wagner & Walton Goggins Talk Fallout

Walton, Fallout is not your first game adaptation. What makes video game adaptations special for you?

Walton Goggins: As a matter of fact, Geneva wrote the script for Tomb Raider [starring Alicia Vikander], and that’s where we met. I just fell madly in love with her as a writer and as a talent. She’s so good.

I follow the story. Wherever the best stories are and whatever opportunities I’m given, that’s where I gravitate. Game adaptations are the best they’ve ever been, and I think we’re in a golden age of that type of storytelling. The storytellers and the authors of these games are so good. It’s so nuanced, and it is such a four-dimensional experience for the player. It just made sense for me; I love it.

Graham Wagner: If there was no Fallout, and I pitched a show about the end of the world, but not our world; a different world with all the complexity of Fallout? I’ve pitched my fair share of crazy shows, and been [rejected]. It wouldn’t have happened; it wouldn’t have unleashed the money needed to create a show of this scale or the scope. We’re super grateful for the popularity of video games allowing this kind of storytelling to happen onscreen and to get an audience worthy of the expense of making one.

Walton Goggins: We talked about this earlier, but what comes first: the chicken or the egg? At first, it was the movies that drove the construction of these games, and now it’s reversed. It’s the games themselves that are pushing these experiences cinematically. That’s been cool. Regal.

We get to see two sides of your character, Walton. We get to see the Ghoul, and he is also our view into what life was like before the Fallout. What can you say about these two characters, how they’re the same and how they’re different? And what is his overall role in this post-Fallout world?

Walton Goggins: I think the biggest difference was, as Cooper Howard, I was only in the makeup chair for 15 minutes. [laughs] What can I tell you? Not much other than his name was Cooper Howard. There’s so much we want you to wait to see, but I can say that he is vastly different from the Ghoul. There’s still, hopefully, some Cooper Howard left in the goal. But they’re two very, very, very different yet similar people.

Graham Wagner: We were really interested in trying to create a character that was two characters essentially. How do you do that? And it’s time. Give someone 200 years of experience in post-apocalyptic America, and they’re gonna be a little different. That journey is what this guy’s seen, and how he went from one guy to another guy.

Walton Goggins: I think that’s true for all of us in life. I was 19 years old when I moved to Los Angeles, and I’m 52 now. While they’re the same people, they are very, very, very different. Very different people after the things that one sees over the course of one’s life. It’s just funny to have it predicated on a nuclear f–king war.

Your show premieres a little over a year after The Last of Us, which showed that TV adaptations from video games could appeal to a broader audience. How do you feel about the stakes of following that act, and do you think that Fallout has the potential to appeal to a broader audience?

Graham Wagner: I certainly speak to the second part of the question, and I feel that Fallout can appeal to a broader audience; the audience already for Fallout is pretty massive. People of all walks of life been have drawn to this thing. Our job is just to get to the people who couldn’t figure out the buttons.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch The Last of Us because I didn’t want to get in my head about it, and I knew that we had a completely different exercise. They have a very specific story with very specific characters. This is an open-world game, so my experience of playing Fallout is probably very different than your experience of Fallout. Playing Fallout 4 way back, I shot my own son in the face. That’s unique, and that’s because I don’t like to go on the roads,; I like to go into the woods so I can get my experience points up. And then I find myself landing in story points way out of order. That’s how I play all those open-world games, and I like it, but that’s my experience.

We’re not adapting a narrative; we’re just creating a new narrative in the same setting, which I think every gamer does when they play it. Your story is different from your best buddy; you have a very different experience playing this game.

Walton Goggins: I watched all of The Last of Us, and Pedro is a very good friend of mine. I was blown away by what they did. We were in the middle of filming this when he was filming his, and it was done. I saw the first poster on the subway in New York and texted him, and I said, “Oh, my God, this looks so good.” And it was that good. But I think, like with anything, there’s enough room for all these stories. You stay in your own lane, and you’re not creating something better than or less than. There is no comparison; it’s just a different experience.

Screen Rant: Just based on the teaser trailer, it seems like there is that sense of tongue-in-cheek humor from the Fallout games. Graham, you have such expertise in comedy. How has that influenced your script?

Graham Wagner: I’ve done some pretty broad things, and I didn’t want that for this. This is not what I’d call a comedy-forward show, because the premise is already pretty funny. What happens if you outsource the survival of the human race to a private corporation? Things get weird. That’s funny, and that’s bizarre, and that’s absurd. Our character Lucy grew up in a Vault where everyone wears matching blue jumpsuits. That’s already pretty weird, so I didn’t want to cram the show full of zingers.

I was the assh-le in the editing room pulling out jokes, because the science fiction buy-in is really difficult. The suspension of disbelief; you’ve got an uphill battle there. And so, it doesn’t help to have someone saying, “Did that just happen? Are you really riding a dragon now?” It’s like, “No, you’re not, actually. Why are you reminding me of that?” One of my least favorite tropes in sci-fi comedy is seeing someone with a testicle on their forehead and being like, “Do you really have a testicle?” It’s like, “No, you did that yourself.” You’re drawing attention to your own joke.

We wanted to be able to invest in the world and commit to it. And in order to do that, we had to do it ourselves. There is absurdism, yes, but there’s absurdism in life. It doesn’t need to be pushed that much farther.

Walton Goggins: I’ve been lucky to work with some pretty fine people over the course of my career, and I don’t feel like I’ve ever told a joke, to be quite honest with you. It’s always situational, and if you believe it, they’ll believe it. Whether that’s comedy, or whether that’s drama, more important beyond both of those genres is just the humanity and the human experience. We all laugh, and we all cry, and we all get angry, and we all experience joy and all the rest of it.

The tone that Graham, Geneva, Jonah, and Lisa achieved in the show [means] the lines just come out the way that they come out. And you will infer from them what you will infer. But for me, the funniest things that I’ve ever been a part of are when I don’t know how to feel. I’m more concerned with, “Oh, my God, what am I experiencing right now?” and just checking in while I’m experiencing it. Those tend to be the funniest things for me. We didn’t go for jokes; they’re just built into the DNA of the story.

I love Portlandia. Will that tone, social critique, and absurdity also be present?

Graham Wagner: There are definitely, I’d say, Portlandia flavors in the Vault. We started developing the show before COVID, and then COVID happened. Geneva and I were writing the first episode when we realized we’d become Vault dwellers. People were delivering our groceries to our door while we were staying at home, and that became sort of absurd. The absurdity was not lost on us.

I think in the vault, especially, there’s slight [echoes]. We have Kyle McLaughlin in the Vault, that’s not an accident. The idea of cozy progressives; that’s sort of what the energy is there. We’re aiming inward with jokes at ourselves, like we do on Portlandia. I remember prepping a sketch on Portlandia where I was like, “Do we know anyone guilty of this joke we’re doing now? No, we gotta cut this sketch.” Because it had to be someone we knew or cared about and loved to make fun of it. Otherwise, it’s just polemic.

Walton, you are not only an integral part of one of the best series of all time, The Shield, but also Justified and Sons of Anarchy. Those series share a similar darkness and roughness. Do you think that the Ghoul has something in common with your characters on these shows?

Walton Goggins: I mean, none of them have lived through a nuclear war. But I suppose there are similarities with every role I’ve ever played. If you look back at [an actor’s] canon, by and large, there’s a similar way of walking or similar way of talking. There is a thread through a person’s career, and I’m no exception to that at all.

For this experience, I didn’t play the game, so I didn’t have that to draw from. I didn’t want to go back and be exposed to that, because I didn’t want to be influenced by it. But I started watching a lot of movies, which is what I always do, and I had the time because I was in the makeup chair for quite some time every day. I watched a lot of Westerns that I’d seen before, like 40 Westerns. Two in particular were Once Upon a Time in the West — really to see what Fonda was doing — and then what Paul Newman was doing in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He’s a rascal, and you can’t take your eyes off him, and he’s funny as s–t. And he never tells a joke.

Fonda is ruthless, and Paul is so charismatic. Therein lies the answer: what is that for me? How do I look at both of those, and take those influences, and then think about that? It just comes from my heart and lives in my imagination.

Graham Wagner: I think there is a commonality with those other characters, which is your muscle as an actor and the commitment. I watched you in Vice Principals commit to that character in such a hard way that it almost brought a tear to my eye, because all I want out of comedy is for people to actually be the guy. To actually just live it, as opposed to the winking.

For me, it was absolutely necessary to have an actor with that level of commitment, because it’s a huge ask to play the Ghoul. It was just astonishing to watch, and I will be eternally grateful for this series.

I wanted to talk about the world that you had to build. The Last of Us is a very interesting connection because that’s clearly a post-apocalyptic modern world show, whereas Fallout is this era where American exceptionalism never ended. America is the best, nothing bad ever happens here — and then the worst thing happened. What was it like building out what that world was like before, and then also what it was like after?

Graham Wagner: Yeah, we had to show a destroyed world, but not our world, but sort of our world. It was maddening for everybody, but we had an incredible production designer and props people who went above and beyond. They would come to set, and it was like, “Oh, my God. I hadn’t thought of that, but thank God you did.” They just had everything covered. An immense challenge, for sure, and very frustrating at times to be the nuisance, to be like, “No, not that,” and just being annoying to people. But so many people on the show got it and had done all their homework.

I’ve been playing these games since 1997, when my college roommates and I were playing Fallout 1 during my first year of university in Edmonton, Alberta. It’s all kind of baked in for me, and I can forget that not everyone has been doing that. But we were just blessed with a lot of people, and luckily the game is popular enough that a decent portion of our crew was very familiar with it.

Walton, your character is basically going to be our window into what the world was like before. What was it like for you getting to explore that very bizarre era?

Walton Goggins: I want to answer that question, and if I had one more cup of coffee, I might be goaded into it. I can talk about the period, right?

Hypothetically, this series explores [the premise] of American exceptionalism and Pax Americana. The Jetsons, the Great Society, all of it happened. We were at the apex of human evolution, and that’s when the world ended. Watergate never happened; the Vietnam War never happened. Why wouldn’t they believe in their government and believe in each other and believe in this system? I think that we’re all nostalgic for life before these f–king things [cellphones], for those of us who’ve been around. To go back to a time where things were simpler, music was what it was, there were three choices on television, and all the rest of it. I think that’s gonna get people. It’s nice to kind of be in that world. I had a great time.

Your character has lived for a couple hundred years, and he’s probably very cynical. All the other Ghouls we see in the world are also very cynical. What exactly is the relationship that he has with the world he lives in now?

Walton Goggins: You’re exactly right. This is a person who has been walking this Earth for 200 years. In the Wasteland, he has seen the worst side of human nature, and he is left without emotion. He’s cynical, and he also has a wicked sense of humor. But he wasn’t always that way. He was different, and his association and worldview were different than what it is now. Now, he’s a bounty hunter — and a legend at it.

He is, in some ways, like what Jonah said in an article for Vanity Fair. He’s the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. And then the next thing that the writer of that article said was, “The Ghoul is the good, the bad, and ugly.” It’s true; he’s all of those things, and it was as funny as it can be. But it was f–king hard emotionally, man, if you care about it, and you believe in it, and you commit to it. To have that outlook on life is a lot at the end of the day.

I think you’ll relate to his worldview when you when you see the things that people do, and you’ll have a grace and some empathy and some nostalgia for Lucy’s optimism and naivete. And maybe in your own life, you’ll want to be like Maximus, the man who is looking for bravery and order in the universe. The way in which you will hopefully identify with the Ghoul is someone who embraces the f–king chaos. The world is chaotic, and he just moves through it. There is something to be said for all three of those worldviews; they are ways in which to live one’s life.

Screen Rant: Between all the games that are available to play and Fallout lore in general, how did you decide what to cobble together into this original yet canon story? Was there a back-and-forth with Bethesda with Todd Howard about what to take from each game? Or alternately, was he like, “That’s going in Fallout 5.”

Graham Wagner: There was a constant conversation with Todd, and we had James Altman from Bethesda on set every single day of filming. We didn’t feel like we were being policed; it felt like we’re being helped. And it also just made me feel safe, knowing that these guys are on it, too. I’ve been playing the games for a long time, but [when it comes to] how to choose what made it in, there are so many limitations, in terms of just eight hours of a TV show versus thousands and thousands of hours of gameplay over 25 years.

We just followed the characters and where the characters are going, and we had so much s–t to pull up and confront them with at any juncture that we needed. If we needed them to face a problem, there were a million problems available to us. But we try not to dive right into season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because it’s just too much. We took it pretty slow, and we’re sort of opening up the world as we go. If enough people watch it, we’re gonna get to continue to open up the world. There’s all kinds of stuff we didn’t get to in the first season that I cannot wait to get to.

About Fallout

Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. Two hundred years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind—and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.

Check out our other CCXP interview with Jonathan Nolan, Ella Purnell, and Aaron Moten.