Fallout’s Walton Goggins Reveals Painful Process of Becoming The Ghoul

Walton Goggins had to endure hours in the makeup chair for his role in Fallout. Now he’s explained precisely what the process entailed.

Speaking to The Wrap, Goggins praised prosthetic designer Vincent Van Dyk, who “designed pieces that were very thin, but very durable so that it would still be me underneath there and I could still experience my own facial reactions and they would be able to pick all of that up.”

In the article, Goggins says it took about nine months to get the prosthetics right. When they landed on the look, the initial application took five hours, but was eventually refined to a swift hour and 45 minutes.

During that time, Goggins got in character by watching Westerns. “I couldn’t close my eyes. I had to sit in one place the whole time. So I just would put on a Western and just did research. [Van Dyk] got so good at it that I said, ‘Man, you need to take a little more time’ because some of these movies we were watching were like two and a half hours long.”

In terms of The Ghoul’s missing nose, it was removed in post-production using CGI, the only non-practical part of the look.

Despite the attention to detail, Goggins needed reassurance from Fallout writer/director Jonathon Nolan his performance was coming across.

“[I] asked Jonah after the first couple of takes, ‘What are you reading? What are you seeing?’ He said, ‘We’re seeing it all, everything that you’re doing’ and a big part of that was because I had my eyes. At one point, we toyed with putting contacts in and then all of a sudden, it became a very different experience for everyone in the room, so we quickly took them out.”

With Fallout’s eighth and final episode setting up the next season, Goggins might be returning to the makeup chair soon.

Here's exactly what he went through during the show: all Fallout season 1 episodes recapped.