Fallout Cast and Producers on Finding the Funny in the Apocalypse
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The post Fallout Cast and Producers on Finding the Funny in the Apocalypse appeared first on Consequence.
Making a post-apocalypse show like Fallout in 2024, series star Walton Goggins says, has a lot of irony to it. “We live in a chaotic world,” he tells Consequence. “I don’t know that we’ve never not lived in a chaotic world, going back 5,000 years on some level. But people are unsure about a lot of different things right now — and this just so happens to coincide with the uncertainty in the world that we live in now. It hasn’t gone unnoticed.”
The series, based on the acclaimed video game franchise, is set in as grim an apocalyptic wasteland as you could imagine; giant cockroaches and roving raiders of both the alive and undead variety being largely what remains on the surface of the Earth, following a cataclysmic series of bombings over 200 years ago. Yet Fallout sets itself apart not with the brutality of its story but its humor, an element of the games that the executive producers were determined to bring into their story.
The first three episodes of the series were directed by executive producer Jonathan Nolan (Westworld), who says that they first began talking about a Fallout adaptation in 2019, “and that feels like at least three apocalypses ago,” he laughs.
At that point, Nolan continues, “The concerns of the game series and the show felt almost old-fashioned. Now, sadly, after the pandemic, and the resurgence of warfare and violence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it just feels, unfortunately, like the show has gotten more and more relevant every year that we’ve been working on it. I would happily have it be a little less relevant and go back to being a little retro. But through a pandemic, through all of the scary shit that’s happening right now, it has been nice to work on this project, that has a bit of a sense of humor, even if it’s dark humor. I think there’s been a bit of expiation in that for all of us.”
Michael Emerson (Lost), who plays a mysterious scientist who knows more than most, likes “the way violence and humor are merged in this project. Looking at myself with my own foot blown off — there’s something…” He can’t quite find the word, trying a few on: “Comic, absurd, ghastly, monstrous… There’s something cuckoo about it. So that’s been one of the adventures of my work on Fallout.”
That very specific sense of humor is something Nolan traces back to his experience playing the first game. “I never quite felt that tone brought together before, where you have this dark, violent, epic landscape, but it’s infected with political satire, subversion, and, and humor. I had just never experienced anything like that before, and it’s one of the things we hope to bring to an audience who maybe had never played the games before.”
Along similar lines, co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet hopes that the qualities that make the game special are what “we faithfully adapted and brought in. Fallout is obviously one of the greatest video games of all time, but what I think makes it really unique among the pantheon of games is its tone, which is this incredible blend of weird comedy and moral dilemmas and action and drama. That was something that was just really important to us to try to bring to the screen.”
Her partner in showrunning, Graham Wagner, says that another element from the games he was excited to bring in was the late ’90s sensibility of protesting globalization — “It was a fun period of being hyper-critical of the massive corporations that were encroaching on our everyday lives. The opportunity to tell that story on Amazon Prime is very delicious.”
The show’s strange tone proved to be a major draw for the cast — at least, actor Ella Purnell says she was drawn to the fact that as apocalypse shows go, this one is “a lighthearted one… Okay, lighthearted is the wrong word,” she laughs. “But it uses comedy as a relief, let’s put it that way. It’s not lighthearted, it’s still devastating, and has heart and is a drama, but it’s also funny and it’s absurdist and political and satirical. And I think actually in the face of an actual apocalypse, I think what’s left of humans would use comedy as a way to deal with it, as we often do with most tragedies.”
Her co-star Aaron Moten agrees, noting that “it’s such a specific tone, and it’s something that fans of the game are going to recognize, I think. But it’s something that I think is going to be surprising for people that are newcomers to it. I mean, they’re gonna think, ‘Oh, this is clever and funny.'”
In playing Lucy, a vault dweller who’s lived a privileged life before circumstances lead her to venture out to the surface, Purnell believes that “you could put a hundred people in the same situation and every single person will react completely differently — and I think that’s something I like about Lucy, is a lot of the funny moments for Lucy come from her willingness to just go through it, put one foot in front of the other. This ‘okie dokey’ attitude. You put someone who is completely sheltered and privileged and innocent on the Wasteland — it writes itself.” She laughs. “I’m just kidding. It doesn’t write itself. We have writers.”
Wagner says that recently, he said something about how the first post-apocalyptic fiction was written by Mary Shelley. “And Geneva corrected me and was like, ‘I think it’s the Bible.’ It does feel like we’ve been constantly convincing ourselves that, like, ‘This is it, guys — we’re on the edge. We’re the very edge of the brink here. It’s all wrapping up.’ I wonder if that’s something that’s a constant in the human condition — the sort of hubris of, ‘It’s going to end on my watch.'”
Fallout (Prime Video)
In the case of this particular fictional apocalypse, Kyle MacLachlan says that while we’ve all seen other projects take on nuclear devastation on this scale, “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it presented so casually and so effectively as in Fallout — you’re at a party and people are acknowledging that there’s turmoil in the world, and then you fall off the edge. It was the casualness that I think really impacted me. That we can be so close and be so nonchalant about it. This is exactly how it would feel. And you’d be like, now what do we do?”
Emerson says that coming into the project, “so much was unknown, because it was hard to tell from the script where the reality of the played moment was going to be — and then you find out that it’s some desert or some wasteland that you’re going to be moving around in and living in and talking in. And that’s an adjustment. You know, on shows I’ve moved around in New York City and on mysterious islands — maybe there was some connection there. But it was it was just kind of thrilling, like a leap off a ledge.”
Fallout ultimately is a story of survival, MacLachlan feels, as well as “what do people do and how do they survive? We as a human race will survive. But at what cost?”
That said, MacLachlan’s character — overseer Hank MacLane, who at the beginning of the series is the leader of one of the vaults — is an optimistic one. “Hank is optimistic. He’s gonna say, ‘We’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out. We will survive.'”
Fallout (Prime Video)
MacLachlan fully acknowledges that Fallout is “pretty wild” (even in comparison to past projects he’s worked on, like Twin Peaks and Portlandia). Yet, he adds, “the basics are the same — creating a character, and fortunately working with really talented people. All that is part of the fun. The difference is just the world. Being able to take [the video game] franchise and turn it into real things that you can touch and feel was so much fun. That for me was the discovery. Every day I’d come to set and there’d be something new to play with, something new to work with, which I really enjoyed.”
MacLachlan adds that when he first received the signature Fallout “Pip-Boy” gauntlet, he knew that “I want to make this feel like I’m so comfortable, because I’ve grown up with this thing. You have a way of being able to reveal character, even just through your relationship with your prop — which I get a kick out of.”
As MacLachlan talks about that, he consciously or unconsciously touches his forearm a few times, where his character wears his Pip-Boy in the show. He acknowledges that that was one of those props he enjoyed playing with — and “I can’t wait to get it back on.”
Odds of that happening are pretty good, as Fallout Season 2 has yet to be greenlit officially, but has received a California state tax credit to help make production possible. Meanwhile, Season 1 is now set to premiere early, all eight episodes debuting Wednesday, April 10th at 9:00 p.m. ET/6:00 p.m. PT on Prime Video.
Fallout Cast and Producers on Finding the Funny in the Apocalypse
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