Fallout’s Walton Goggins on Preparing to Play the Ghoul

Most people plan to show up for a new job well-prepared—but few are as ready for action as Walton Goggins was for Fallout. In a new interview, the actor talked about how he crafted his Emmy-nominated performance, bringing layers of nuance and complexity to a character that starts off in the show’s timeline as a 1950s movie cowboy, then pops up hundreds of years later as a noseless outlaw roaming the nuclear wastelands.

Speaking to Vulture, Goggins—a veteran actor who’s long been crafting memorable characters on TV (Justified, Deadwood, The Righteous Gemstones, The Shield, Invincible) and in movies (Predators, The Hateful Eight, Ant-Man and the Wasp)—gave a peek inside his acting process. To say it’s both thorough and detail-obsessed would be an understatement.

“[I] watched a lot of movies that I have seen before in preparation for this, really kind of looking not so much for the Ghoul, even though that was a part of it, but Cooper Howard. He is a 1950s western-movie star. So I really wanted to understand who his contemporaries were. What jobs did he lose out on? What jobs did he get?,” Goggins told Vulture.

He thought about Howard’s path to Hollywood stardom—in Goggins’ mind, he was a charismatic guy who was good at riding horses and just sort of fell into show biz—and studied, in particular, Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He also read the Fallout script 250 times, something he learned to do from former co-star Anthony Hopkins, and that helps him absorb the material intuitively: “Your ego really has to get out of the way.”

To get into the Ghoul’s mindset specifically, Goggins really focused on the mental transformation Howard went thorough all those years in the post-apocalypse. “Whenever you say, on paper, Oh, he’s been alive for 200 years. That’s hard to wrap your head around,” Goggins said.

He continued. “I don’t think about it in those terms. It’s like, let’s break down these 200 years. What does that really look like? Day one: What happened in the moment after the bomb dropped? Did he wake up five days later? Did he get up immediately? … Then I thought, what was it like the first time somebody tried to kill him for food or water, for resources? Right? What was it like the first day he had to kill someone for those very things? And the disintegration of a true morality—what is your true north? And the disintegration of everything he knew. He comes from a moral into an amoral existence.”

Fallout season one is now streaming on Prime Video; the Ghoul’s journey will continue in season two.

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