Walton Goggins Tackles the Big Questions Through ‘Fallout’ — and Hopes You Can, Too
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When you first see The Ghoul in “Fallout,” the most pronounced feature of Walton Goggins’ character is what’s missing. Just under the brim of his weathered cowboy hat and just above his wrinkled upper lip — you know, where his nose should be — there isn’t one. You can see the narrow nostril-dividing tissue, but there are no nostrils to divide. Instead, there’s just an A-shaped hole in his face. A cavity. An absence. So even though it’s obvious the handsome charmer from “Justified” is there, buried under a pound of latex, Prime Video viewers may not realize the physical demands of a role visibly defined by what’s been removed.
“I can’t see so well. I mean, I could see, but your periphery is gone,” Goggins said in an interview with IndieWire. “I’ve got these things over my teeth, so it’s hard to talk. It’s exhausting to talk. It’s hot. […] It was physically exhausting and I didn’t realize until we got everything on. The first day just so happened to coincide with a day in New York where the heat index was like 106. I didn’t have a cooling suit because we didn’t even think about it. It was not even a part of the process. And I don’t complain. I don’t really ask for much, except time in front of the camera. So there was a point pretty early in the day where I sat down and I could feel my body just– not shutting down, but getting very heavy. And I just said, ‘Man, you’re getting too old for this shit.'”
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Goggins, at 52 years young, has stretched himself in just about every way an actor can. After breaking through as a cop on “The Shield” and a criminal on “Justified,” he hit the big screen for franchises like “Tomb Raider,” “Predators,” and “Ant-Man.” He earned art-house accolades in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna,” and two Quentin Tarantino pictures: “Django Unchained” and “The Hateful Eight.” Goggins even led a CBS family sitcom, “The Unicorn” for two seasons, in between outrageous comic arcs in Danny McBride’s “Vice Principals” and “The Righteous Gemstones.”
“I wish I could tell you that it’s all premeditated,” Goggins said of his sweeping career trajectory. He credits his agents for helping him break up big movies with indie films and shorter parts with long-running TV characters. “I’ve also been very lucky, really. I’ve been given some great opportunities and I just, for the most part, play it as it lays.”
With “Fallout,” Goggins plays a somewhat familiar profession: a former actor by the name of Cooper Howard. But that was before bombs were dropped on Los Angeles, scorching the Earth as we know it and sending many citizens underground. Two-hundred years later, Cooper has somehow survived (a mysterious backstory teased in recurring flashbacks), although he’s now a chemically altered bounty hunter known only as The Ghoul. (When a tranquilizer dart doesn’t faze him, the Ghoul says, “Well now, that is a very small drop in a very large bucket of drugs.”)
For Goggins, what hooked him was story built around very real fears but told in an accessible, even cheeky, way.
“Shows about the world ending have been made for a hundred years,” he said. “Now, given how scary things are, [we can] explore this bleak reality with humor and talk about things going on in the world — the 1 percent versus everybody else.”
Here, Goggins cites the group of survivors living in a series of radiation-insulated bunkers. Underground, they’ve formed a cheery, peaceful society. Everyone helps each other, everyone plays their part in the community, and everyone gets along. Some would even call “the vault” a utopia… if not for the complete lack of sunlight and very real fear of starvation.
“The people that were privileged enough to have a space in the vault, that is an example of how human beings should live,” Goggins said. “Well, that’s just a morality of convenience, isn’t it? It’s because they have resources. Everybody else on the surface was left to die, and [what happens up there] is probably what would happen if, God forbid, this were to ever become a reality.”
Given “Fallout” fits snugly within the post-apocalyptic genre, Goggins was also glad co-showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, as well as pilot director and executive producer Jonathan Nolan, didn’t linger on the world’s actual end.
“We didn’t show or really spend a lot of time on the destruction of the world, and I’m so grateful,” Goggins said. “I don’t want to see Manhattan get torn apart again. I don’t want to see Los Angeles get torn apart again, or the Eiffel Tower get destroyed. We get right to it.”
The “it,” at least for Goggins, isn’t just what happens after the nuclear strikes, but asking deeper questions about human nature — questions Goggins thought about when as a kid raised during the Cold War, doing “drop and cover drills” at school and having “conversations” about why.
“Why are we so fractious as a species? Why can’t we get over some of [our trivial differences] to solve these bigger fucking problems?” he said. “‘Fallout’ deals with a lot of that, talks about a lot of that, but without being on a soapbox.”
Speaking of not taking things too seriously: Goggins has spoken before about how he prefers to stay in-character while shooting. “[But] it’s not pretentious,” he said. “It’s just fun, man. It’s fun to sit there and just to stay in it. I have my life, and as soon as I leave work, I’m out. I don’t take it home. I go have a glass of wine, I hang out with my kid, I do my thing. But when I go to work, I’m there to work.”
“People call it method acting. That’s such bullshit, man. It’s just a way of working and most of my heroes that I’ve worked with stay in it. I wish that I was the kind of guy that could laugh and then go in and [act out] hurting a bunch of people, but I’m not that guy. Some of the best in the business can do that. I wish I could. It would make it a lot easier. But I have my process and I’m sticking with it.”
Goggins said once he put on the prosthetics to play The Ghoul, it was pretty easy to stay in character. He’s not weighed down by the nefarious nature of his violent outlaw, even if donning all that gear can be exhausting.
“It’s all OK. You get used to it,” he said. “And yeah — I would do it again.”
Maybe in Season 2, he’ll even get to keep his nose.
“Fallout” premieres Thursday, April 11 on Amazon Prime Video. All eight episodes will be released at once.
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