‘Fallout’ Star Walton Goggins On His Dual Role As Cooper Howard And The Ghoul & His Time In The Makeup Chair
13.06.2024 - 17:27
/ deadline.com
Walton Goggins often portrays characters who transcend time and place, whether in modern day Kentucky, like in FX’s Justified, as career criminal Boyd Crowder, or in Civil War-era Wyoming in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, as plucky sheriff Billy Crash. In Fallout, though, he goes further: as The Ghoul, he is 200-year-old apocalypse survivor Cooper Howard, once a favored Western movie star, now a mutant bounty hunter. The two halves of this character combine in a captivating performance for which Goggins was happy to endure a torturous prosthetic.
DEADLINE: How did you get involved with making Fallout?
WALTON GOGGINS: It started with a conversation actually, a Zoom call, with Jonathan Nolan, Geneva [Robertson-Dworet] and Graham [Wagner]. The three of us got on the phone about eight months before we started shooting, and they just told me about this story that they were making and this role that they wanted me for, and we just really started breaking down exactly what the story was about and how they wanted to approach it.
And right out of the gate, maybe two minutes into the conversation, I did say that I was in, no matter what. Geneva’s an old friend of mine and maybe there is no bigger fan of Jonathan Nolan than me, and I’ve been a fan of Graham’s for a really long time too. And it was only after saying I was in that they said, “Well, don’t you want to know who you’re playing?” And I said, “It doesn’t really matter. I’m in.” And they said, “Well, you’re going to be playing a noseless, irradiated ghoul,” and I said, “You know what? Maybe I should read those scripts. Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea, and let’s talk afterwards.” I say that because that’s what happened, but, really, it began with a conversation, and