Walton Goggins in âFallout:â No nose, but a lot of John Wayne swagger
We only get a few glimpses of native Walton Goggins in the new trailer for the “Fallout” TV series, but it looks like another memorable role for the Alabama native.
Goggins, born in Birmingham and raised in Georgia, has a history of playing captivatingly intense characters thriving in amoral, violent environments: Detective Shane Vedrell in “The Shield,” Boyd Crowder in “Justified,” Chris Mannix in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.” In fairness he has an extensive and varied list of credits, including whimsical projects such as the mockumentary “John Bronco,” in which he played a larger-than-life off-road racer.
“Fallout” is a new Prime TV series adapted from the video game series of the same name; the general idea is that the world blew up and went to hell a long time ago, and whenever protagonists leave the safety of protected complexes called vaults, they find a post-nuclear-apocalypse landscape full of trouble. The franchise has been successful since the original game’s release in 1997, generating several full-fledged sequels and numerous spinoffs. This 26-year run guarantees a substantial audience curious to see whether the planned show measures up.
The TV series is due for release in April 2024, and a trailer dropped over the weekend is a first taste of how it’ll feel. In short: Tense, spooky, violent, gory and likely a little surreal. The latter is certainly true of the trailer itself, which sets an action-heavy montage to the sweeping strains of Nat King Cole’s “I Don’t Want to See Tomorrow.”
We see two version of Goggins’ character in that montage. One is a man in rodeo attire, frantically pulling a girl onto a horse as some sort of disaster erupts in the background; they’re then shown riding across a landscape where mushroom clouds are erupting. The other is a scarred, noseless gunslinger who appears to be highly capable in a fight.
While Amazon hasn’t put out a ton of information about what goes on in the series, it has identified Goggins’ character as “The Ghoul.” According to Screen Rant, he’s something different than the no-name ghouls used as “cannon fodder” in the game. Once a man named Cooper Howard, he has lived for hundreds of years since his exposure to radiation and has become something of a bounty hunter, a “ruthless-yet-honor-bound sharpshooter.”
According to Collider.com, Goggins spoke about his approach during a group interview at a Brazilian convention. He said he avoided delving into the games, because he didn’t want to be overly influenced by them. Instead, he drew on role models from classic Westerns: John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
“So for me, the time that it took for this application, it took a while … but I would watch a movie every day,” Goggins said. “I’d seen a lot of these movies, but when I go to work, I like to kind of stay in that head and there’s a lot to kind of answer for who The Ghoul is now, and this man Cooper Howard. So, I watched a lot of John Wayne — watched ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ and ‘Rio Bravo’ and ‘Stagecoach’ — and all of Clint [Eastwood’s] stuff with [Sergio] Leone … and Mr. [Henry] Fonda in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ and then ‘The Wild Bunch,’ just a lot of those things. And it’s like, “Oh, OK, I know all of these,” but even ‘Butch Cassidy [and the Sundance Kid].’”
Goggins went on to describe his character as “a rascal, and I like being a rascal. His timing is impeccable. His worldview is predicated on the things that he’s seen for 200 years, so there is nothing naive about him, and that’s really kind of where I started it from, it wasn’t with the game.”
“Fallout” debuts on April 12.