One of the first, and arguably still most, intriguing things about Amazon’s Fallout adaptation was the news that Walton Goggins would appear in the series—with the intrigue doubled further when that news was paired with the fact he’d be playing a noseless, peeling, irradiated creature known as a Ghoul. That remains the case as we’ve seen more of the show, and Goggins is only playing up the intrigue further.
Today’s trailer revealed that Fallout will play with Goggins’ character as we glimpse his life before and after the nuclear apocalypse ravages its spin on a retro-aesthetic, neo-future America—and that before he was a lone wolf outlaw roaming the wastelands as a rad-soaked creature, Goggins’ character was intrinsically linked to the development of the Vaults that many of Fallout’s gaming protagonists have called home across the series, the bunkers/social experiments that helped people survive the fallout of nuclear war.
“The Ghoul is, in some ways, the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. He’s the guide, if you will, through this irradiated hellscape that we find ourselves in in this post-apocalyptic world,” Goggins explained to press at a recent conference for the show, via a recorded message. “He is a bounty hunter… he is pragmatic, he is ruthless, he has his own set of moral codes, and he has a wicked sense of humor. Much like me!”
Although for the most part we’ll encounter Goggins as the Ghoul in Fallout’s wasteland, we’ll also see a lot of Goggins pre-irradiation in the series too—and learn more about is former life as a man named Cooper Howard. “He’s a very, very, very complicated guy, and to understand him, you have to understand the person that he was before the war… he was a vastly different person than the ghoul that you’ve seen so far,” Goggins continued. “Over the course of the show, through his experience back in the world before the nuclear fallout, you will understand how the world was. And he is the bridge between both these worlds.”
Fallout will drop its entire debut season on Amazon Prime Video April 11.
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