Fallout’s Walton Goggins on Discovering The Ghoul’s Past as Well as His Future
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Fallout’s Walton Goggins on Discovering The Ghoul’s Past as Well as His Future appeared first on Consequence.
Technically, Walton Goggins is playing one character in the new Prime Video series Fallout — the catch is, he has two names, and two faces. Or, as Goggins puts it to Consequence, “I feel like they’re two separate people that are connected throughout time. It is the same person, but they are very different people. They’re connected, but I needed to understand who Cooper Howard was first in order to understand who the Ghoul was, and what he had lost.”
It’s an approach that allows Goggins to dwell in both worlds depicted by the series: The alternate universe America that existed prior to the nuclear apocalypse, as well as the bleak future to come. We first meet Goggins as Cooper Howard, a popular movie star known for his work in Westerns — over 200 years later, that name is long gone from memory, as Cooper has become The Ghoul, an exceptionally self-reliant semi-undead survivor searching the wasteland for answers to questions from the Before Times.
Thanks to flashbacks, both iterations of the man are seen frequently in the first season, and in order to play them both, Goggins says he “just really meditated on how to connect them. What are the similarities that one would bring before living before this cataclysmic event, and two hundred years after this cataclysmic event?”
One answer he landed on comes from something that he thinks “is inherent in people as they get older, which is a sense of humor. And a person that has charisma usually always has charisma. So that was something else.” Meanwhile, in addition to the qualities that made Cooper Howard a movie star, Goggins says that “there is a grit, a survival instinct, that is there for both people.”
Figuring out these kinds of details, Goggins says, is something he commits to fully on projects like this: “I get off on that part of the process, man. That is time alone, countless hours I live in my imagination — so much when I am working, sometimes my family will have to say, ‘Hey, come back. Come back.’ ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ve just drifted.'”
That preparation, he says, involves spending time “in my imagination thinking about how did Cooper get into this position, and where did he come from? Who was his first girlfriend? What was the drive like to Los Angeles — because he’s not from there, you know? I just relish that time alone. It’s always been the joy of it for me.”
Fallout (Prime Video)
Goggins put that same level of effort into thinking about The Ghoul, though it was “a little more painful, and it took a little longer. What was his life like the day after? Was he buried? Where was he? What happened to him? Obviously he lived, but what happened a week after?”
Not to mention, he continues, “What is it like seeing the things that one would see in the aftermath of such a horrific event? And then as time goes on, seeing how people changed, and the lack of humanity in in the human population — why is he as cynical as he is?”
Repeats Goggins, about the process, “I just get off on that.”
One element of his research was watching movies as inspiration for both Cooper and The Ghoul — all Westerns, though of a different variety. For Cooper, he notes, George Stevens’s Shane was an inspiration, with Alan Ladd, as well as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, starring Henry Fonda.
For The Ghoul, meanwhile he leaned towards Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — a more post-modern Western. “I mean, no one has more charisma than fucking Paul Newman,” he says. “So between Henry Fonda and Paul Newman, therein lies The Ghoul, I suppose.”
The world occupied by The Ghoul is certainly a harsh one, but while it’s quite different from today, Goggins notes that even right now, “we live in a chaotic world — 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 taking part in a post-apocalypse story like Fallout, Goggins says, isn’t the first time he’s been a part of a project that reflected our current state of being. “I have participated in shows that aligned with what was going on in the world today, like The Shield, in a post-9/11 world, to The Hateful Eight and what was going on in the world then, to you name it, a number of different things I’ve been involved with.”
As he continues, “It hasn’t gone unnoticed, the irony that one brother, Christopher Nolan, just made a movie about the making of the first atomic bomb. Months later, his brother [executive producer Jonathan Nolan] is making a movie about the dropping of those bombs. That’s pretty remarkable. What are the chances of that happening, really? And it did.”
Adds Goggins, “So yeah, I’m just grateful to be along for the ride.”
Fallout Season 1 is streaming now on Prime Video.
Fallout’s Walton Goggins on Discovering The Ghoul’s Past as Well as His Future
Liz Shannon Miller
Popular Posts
