After starting out as a post-apocalyptic video game series, “Fallout” is finally stepping out of the vault and onto TV screens.
From Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the masterminds behind HBO’s “Westworld,” Prime Video’s “Fallout” takes viewers back to the 1960s before blowing things up — literally. A jaw-dropping nuclear explosion, rivaling the skull-rattling blast seen in Nolan’s brother Christopher’s best picture winner “Oppenheimer,” kicks off the series, before then jumping over 200 years into the future. The majority of the show takes place in a retro-futuristic wasteland full of underground vault dwellers, psychotic bandits and irradiated monsters.
“Fallout” started as a role-playing computer game in 1997, which became popular enough to spawn a sequel a year later. The franchise really caught on with 2008’s “Fallout 3” when video game developer Bethesda — behind such hits as the “Elder Scrolls” fantasy games, and most recently sci-fi title “Starfield” — acquired the rights. Bethesda turned “Fallout” into a sprawling, open-world series, where players could make choices in-game that affected major storylines, from controlling characters’ fates to nuking towns.
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“I used to be a very big gamer, and then I had children. Now they’re gamers, and I get to supervise them,” Nolan says. “Chris and I had a ‘Pong’ set when we were kids. We had a ZX Spectrum, which was an English computer that plugged into a television, and had a series of games that you loaded off of audio tape. The last time we played a game together was probably playing through the co-op campaign in the first ‘Halo’ way back when. We’ve played with his kids and my kids since then. Gaming, from the beginning, has always just been part of family life for us.”
The “Fallout” TV show’s stars, Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten, all had varying degrees of video game knowledge. Goggins had “zero” gaming experience (“Mine ended with ‘Galaga'”) but learned about “Fallout” through his 13-year-old son. Moten watched “Fallout” playthroughs on Twitch, but Purnell encountered some difficulty.
“I’m not a gamer, but I tried to play ‘Fallout.’ I’m just not good at it, and that annoys me because I’m competitive,” she says. “It was the controls that I didn’t get the hang of. My thumbs don’t control the right way.”
To recreate the desolate, post-nuclear wasteland of “Fallout,” the cast, Nolan and showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworetand Graham Wagner traveled to New York, New Jersey, Utah and the Skeleton Coast in Namibia to shoot. They faced some truly apocalyptic weather conditions.
“It was an incredible experience, but exhausting at the end of every day. It was f*cking hot,” says Goggins, who plays an undead, prosthetic-heavy bounty hunter named The Ghoul. “The very first day I put [the costume] on in New York, I think the heat index was like 104 or 105, and we went down and started shooting. At one point, Jonah looked over at me said, ‘I know it’s an emotional scene, but are you crying?’ I said, ‘No, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He reached up and poked my eye and water just came gushing out underneath this prosthetic.”
The first time Goggins put on his ghastly Ghoul look, it was a five-hour process, and then he took an hour to look at himself in the mirror and get into character. After that, the “Fallout” prosthetic team could complete the transformation in less than two hours.
Purnell’s Lucy, a vault dweller who’s lived underground her whole life, and Moten’s Maximus, an armored member of the Brotherhood of Steel, didn’t require such drastic transformations, but they had their own cumbersome costumes. Moten’s power armor, a bulky suit of advanced weaponry, weighed 120 pounds, and took 10-12 minutes to detach from. Meanwhile, Purnell dressed in a blue-and-yellow jumpsuit ripped straight from the “Fallout” video games.
“You play these games and you don’t think about how hard it is to pee in a vault suit,” she says. “Then you wear a costume and you’re working a 16-hour day and suddenly you’re butt-naked in a cubicle, because you got to take your whole thing off to pee.”
On those extra hot days, though, there was one thing that saved the cast.
“Cold packs,” Moten says. “On a set as large as ours, there are so many people to help us through any hard days. Any action sequences out in the sun in this show are most likely brutally hot.”
There were no irradiated monsters or cannibalistic bandits on set, but the blazing heat cranked up the difficulty on this series — which Purnell sees as fitting: “It’s so ‘Fallout,’ isn’t it?”
All eight episodes of “Fallout” are now streaming on Prime Video.
