How Walton Goggins unlocked his dual roles on ‘Fallout’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
[WARNING: The following story contains spoilers about Season 1 of “Fallout.”]
Walton Goggins had one very good reason for committing to “Fallout” with precious little info. “Jonathan Nolan is so charming, anyone would say yes within the first two minutes of talking to him,” he quips to Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I knew nothing about the role, really, and I knew nothing about the property of ‘Fallout.'”
Prior to his Zoom meeting with Nolan, who serves as executive producer and directed the first three episodes, and co-creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, Goggins did some light research on the video game on which the Prime Video series is based. He found a description of a handsome man leaving a vault for the wasteland. “I thought, ‘Oh, my word. This is what they want me for. They want me for this good-looking guy, a hero leaving this vault. Oh, I better stop because I’m getting too excited right now.’ I stopped reading the article,” Goggins recalls. “I got on the Zoom with them and literally within the first two minutes, I said, ‘Listen, I’m in, no matter what. I’m doing this. This is so exciting.’ And they said, ‘Well, don’t you wanna know who you’re playing?’ I said it doesn’t matter. ‘Do you wanna read a script?’ And I said, ‘Sure, but it’s really not that necessary. I’m in.’ And they said, ‘Well, you’re playing a bounty hunter who’s been roaming the wasteland for 200 years and doesn’t have a nose.’ And I said, ‘Ah, well, maybe I should read those scripts.'”
That is an accurate character description, but that’s not the whole story. Goggins plays one character with two names, two distinct personalities and two very distinct faces. In 2077, he’s Cooper Howard, a genial Western movie star of such flicks as “A Man and His Dog,” “GUN” and “Under the Covers” who also plays cowboy at children’s birthday parties and shills for Vault-Tec, the megacorp where his wife works. And he has a nose. In 2296, having survived the nuclear bombs that were dropped 219 years earlier, he’s The Ghoul, a noseless, mutated bounty hunter with irradiated, wax-like skin.
The Ghoul is a shell of his former self, not just in physical appearance but disposition — full of cynicism after witnessing the worst of humanity. The dual roles exploit Goggins’ dexterity across drama (“The Shield”), contemporary Western (“Justified,” for which he received an Emmy nomination in 2011) and comedy (“Vice Principals,” “The Righteous Gemstones,” “The Unicorn,” “I’m a Virgo”). But Cooper and The Ghoul are still the same person, and one can’t exist without the other.
“For me, I needed to understand who Cooper Howard was in order to understand everything that The Ghoul had lost. And Cooper Howard’s world really needed to exist in my imagination. And how do you go about that? I just figured, OK, he’s a B Western actor, but he didn’t come to Hollywood to be an actor,” Goggins explains. He created a backstory for his pre-apocalypse counterpart: Hailing from rural middle America and a great family, Cooper moved to Hollywood with aspirations to be a horse stuntman.
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“He’s such an affable, funny person. He’s got a great sense of humor and is a joy to be around — that’s what he’s like in my mind — and over the course of eating snacks at the crafts service table, another actor had fallen out of a part and the just director said, ‘You know what, Coop?’ — after banging around Hollywood for five years — ‘Coop, here, you say these lines.’ That happens all the time in our business,” Goggins continues. “And he did and it just turns out he was pretty good. And they kept giving him something bigger and bigger to say. And his stunt buddies gave him sh– because all of the sudden he’s got his own trailer and they’re still banging around on the horses out in the sun. And he’s good-natured about it and before you know it, he’s a commodity.”
Cooper’s sense of humor is the one thing Goggins determined The Ghoul would retain from his former self. “He’s very, very funny, right? He’s got a very cynical outlook on life, obviously, a sardonic outlook on life, but he’s funny as sh–.” He developed the rest of the character the same way he did with Cooper: in the details. “I really started thinking about, ‘Well, what was the day like? What were the moments like after the bomb? The shock? Where were you? And where was your daughter? And what was it like a week later or three days later when you were starving?’ the actor shares. “I thought about the first person who tried to kill me for food or for water. I thought about the first person that I killed for food or for water. I thought about the suffering that Cooper had witnessed and then brought that over a 200-year period.”
By the end of the season, fans learn that Cooper’s wife, Barb (Frances Turner), was the architect behind the nuclear apocalypse. The Ghoul has been on a mission to find his family in the wasteland. And do what? That will be explored in Season 2. “I’ve had some discussions with the writers. They’re in the writers’ room now. We all knew when we made Season 1 that it was just the tip of the iceberg,” Goggins teases. “There is so much more to this story that wouldn’t be gratuitous but was baked into the DNA of the games themselves and to this original story that we’ve created in the canon that is ‘Fallout.'”
While Goggins, who is currently filming the third season of “The White Lotus,” is tightlipped about Season 2, he is more than happy to discuss the Cooper Howard feature film he’d want to make himself: “A Man and His Dog.” “That’s probably the one I would be in. I’m a big dog person and have had labs kind of my whole life, since I was a little kid. And so that would be the one that’s kind of this really, really big one, ‘A Man and His Dog.’ ‘The Man from Calabasas’ — just, like, spending all that time in Agoura Hills. I’d love to see that one. [‘Under the Covers’] sounds so dirty. Or it sound so dirty, but we all know it’s an L.A. noir story. I would to see Cooper Howard in ‘Under the Covers.'”
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