This morning, Vanity Fair finally pulled back the curtain on one of our most highly-anticipated TV projects of 2024: Amazon’s Fallout TV series, adapted from the mega-successful video game franchise of the same name by Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. We’ve heard good things about this one, and have certainly had our fingers crossed, but seeing these new images make one thing absolutely certain: Nolan, Joy and company have nailed the look of the Fallout universe.
Most notable among these pics is the one at the top of this page, which gives us our best look yet at Walton Goggins’ character, The Ghoul. For newcomers, the Fallout series takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth 200 years after a massive nuclear war. The (you guessed it) fallout from that war have resulted in a planet that’s overrun with Mad Max-style raiders and other ruthless human beings, but it also created no small number of mutated animals (get ready for giant ants and scorpions), monsters (Super Mutants), and irradiated people whose flesh rots off their skeletons even as they roam freely. Those poor souls are known as Ghouls, and Goggins will be playing one of them.
Nolan describes the character thusly:
“Walton’s equally adept at drama and comedy, which is so difficult. There is a chasm in time and distance between who this guy was and who he’s become, which for me creates an enormous dramatic question: What happened to this guy? So we’ll walk backwards into that. He becomes our guide and our protagonist in that [older] world, even as we understand him to be the antagonist at the end of the world.”
Vanity Fair notes that Goggins’ look has been “dialed back” from the rest of the ghouls in the Fallout TV series, which leads us to believe that Nolan and Joy’s show won’t be skimping on the gore and terrifying creature designs of the Fallout games (VF’s piece does not mention “Deathclaws,” but we’ve gotta assume we’ll see at least one of them before the show’s first season wraps). Bethesda’s games run the gamut in terms of genre, to be sure, but horror is definitely one of the franchise’s dominant flavors, and we’re eager to see how much of that winds up onscreen.
Head on over to Vanity Fair to see the rest of their Fallout photos (and to read more commentary from Nolan, who’s saying all the right things), and do stay tuned for further Fallout updates between now and the show’s April 12th premiere on Prime Video.
