The following article contains major spoilers for the finale of Prime Video's Fallout, “The Beginning.”
“War. War never changes.”
Nothing is more immediately associated with Fallout than that famous line, first spoken by Ron Perlman in the intro to the 1997 isometric RPG that started it all. Not Vault-Tec. Not Nuka Cola. Not even the series' cartoon mascot with a perennial thumbs-up, Vault Boy. Say “war never changes” to a veteran gamer, and the first image that pops to mind will be of Fallout's gonzo, post-nuclear, retrofuturist anti-paradise.
In Prime Video's Fallout series finale, the line is beautifully recontextualized from brand tagline to a moment rich with tragedy. In a pre-war flashback, we see Walton Goggins' Cooper Howard snooping on his wife, Barb, a high-up executive at Vault-Tec. She has hidden a secret from him with shattering consequences: she is revealed as the architect of the nuclear war that will bring humanity to its knees, spearheading a sprawling corporate conspiracy to end the world and rebuild it in Vault-Tec's image. In her curdled logic for the plot, she evokes humankind's propensity for bloody conflict. “War never changes,” she says.
For Cooper, it's a gut-punch betrayal, and the first moment of many which sets him down a dark path towards the barbaric nihilism of The Ghoul. And so, 200 years later, observing the death and destruction at the Griffith Observatory, The Ghoul repeats the line that has haunted him for centuries: “War. War never changes.”
I meet Goggins at a London hotel the day after an early premiere of the show in London. Just as last night, when he amped up the crowd before the projector whirled on the first episode like a circus ringmaster, he bristles with enthusiasm. We sit down to talk about his time on Fallout, including its killer finale.
GQ: Though they're the same person 200 years apart, you're essentially playing two different characters in Cooper Howard and The Ghoul. I wonder if that was a challenge to navigate: one day you're one guy, the next day you're the other. Did you make a separation?
Walton Goggins: The process of becoming The Ghoul took upwards of… and this was on the best day, an hour and 45 minutes. Really two hours. And then by the time you got the clothes on, and you've got the stuff in your mouth, and you're at work, you're three hours into the experience.
The first day [of shooting] was extremely difficult… It was six weeks of The Ghoul before my very first day as Cooper Howard. I had all of this profound insecurity going into playing The Ghoul, because I didn't know what I was conveying emotionally. It was like driving a Ferrari and not knowing how it takes the curves. And so, after three days of asking Jonah [Nolan] after every take, “Are you understanding what's going on inside me?” Because I can't indicate… I don't know how to exaggerate with my facial features. He said, We see it all. It's in your eyes. Everything is there. Don't worry about it. Just do your thing. So that's what I did.
I didn't think about Cooper Howard until the day came to play Cooper Howard. And it just so happened to be the first seven minutes of our story. All of a sudden, I didn't have this makeup on, and I went to work, and it only took me 15 minutes in the chair. I was so excited by that, until I stepped out of the chair, and then I felt very vulnerable, because I didn't have my armor on, you know? All of a sudden, I'm just this guy that's in the world, about to experience for the audience, and the rest of the people in this world, what the end of the world looks like. I didn't anticipate how visceral it would be.
I think we spent a couple of days at that house, and we got it. By the end of those three days, it's like, Okay, now I know who Cooper Howard is. I have him. And then it became a juggling act, but that was a lot of fun. If one began to get boring, which they never did, I had another one to jump into.
What do you remember about shooting the Gulper-baiting scene in episode three, when The Ghoul dunks Lucy underwater?
Well, I remember it minute for minute, because it was my first day of photography. It was the very first day we worked together, and my very first day on film as The Ghoul. I got made up the day before, and was supposed to begin that scene, and [owing to] the nature of production, they just didn't get to my stuff. Jonah was very apologetic, because it was a big kind of build-up beginning that day. But it was actually just a great dry run.
The very next day, we started, and it was like 106 degrees. My spatial awareness was greatly compromised, because I didn't know how to be in the world with all of this stuff on. I certainly hadn't spent more than a couple of hours in it, up until that point. And here we are, looking down the barrel of a 12 or 13 hour day, and it being that hot.
I genuinely sat on a log, and privately said to myself: “You're getting too old for this shit.” And I don't know if I have the stamina to do this. Really. This is day one of a nine-month experience, I am fuckin'… all systems are failing.
Day two, they had a cooling suit flown in, and I wore that, and levelled out, and was able to relax into it, and breathe into it.
When did you get to a point where you felt you'd really cracked it?
I'm gonna say a week into it, by the time we did a portion of a scene where we are walking across a parking lot, and it's still extremely hot, where I'm about to sell Lucy to a group of people in order to get some medicine to stay alive a little bit longer.
By that day, I had it down. And then it kept evolving over time, and it would change… but I knew who he was, I knew how he walked, I knew how he talked. I felt confident enough that I could just be me inside this thing.
When you watch it back, do you see that growth in your performance?
Oh, you'll see it, just because I mentioned it to you. If you watch that scene again, you will hear… cause maybe we looped some of it, but not much of it… that I'm having a [he affects a lisp, like his mouth is full of cotton balls] hard time talking, and there are moments where I'm talking with this retainer in my mouth [his voice returns to normal] and it's hard to get the words out. You can see it. I'm battling against it. It's like: Fuck, how do I get these words out of my mouth?
On the finale: were you aware of the significance of the line “War—war never changes” when you read it? It's a very familiar line from the Fallout games.
I gotta be honest with you, I didn't know that. I had no idea. And I am so happy I didn't know that, because I would have been so intimidated by it.
So no one flagged it with you?
No one flagged me with it. No one told me that it was a line from the game.
It's like, the line. It's the equivalent of “Luke, I am your father.”
[He pauses.] Man, I had no idea. I had no idea. I swear to god. No one ever brought that up to me. No one ever said that. No one ever mentioned it to me.
Give it a little YouTube.
I'm never giving it a YouTube. I don't want to know, you know what I mean? I don't wanna compare it, because then I'd just be doing an impersonation of somebody else saying it.
It's beautifully recontextualized in the show.
Oh, great, okay — if we pulled it off, and you believed it, then there we go. Thank god.
Well, you know, he's evoking the words he heard from the lips of his wife when she essentially sanctioned nuclear genocide.
I can't believe the revelation you just gave me. I don't know how any things that came out of my mouth relate to the game. And thank god. I don't want to know. I mean, it's okay that you're telling me now, because you've already said it. But if you know some of the dialogue from season two, please don't give me a fuckin' clue at all. Oh my god, I would have freaked out. I wouldn't have come to work that day.
We also find out that all this time, The Ghoul has been trying to find his family, who may or may not still be out there. It's a huge reveal.
What was surprising to me, when I read it on the page, even though I had an idea of where it was going… the betrayal that he felt, at understanding that his wife was the principal architect of this entire experience.
I don't know if this was your experience watching it, but the way that the director shot that particular sequence, it was as if I was looking into the camera, looking straight at her, and she was looking at the camera at me. And from her point of view, her argument was righteous. She lays out an idea that is bulletproof in her mind, and it isn't a compromise of morals; this is a reality. And I can never see it that way.
That is clearly the motivation for his staying alive. Why else would he? It has to be something that important. I have an idea in my own head what that means, but is it to seek revenge? Is his daughter alive? I don't know the answer to that question. Is his wife alive? I don't know the answer to that question, either. So is it a reunion? Is it an opportunity to say what you didn't get a chance to say, 200 years earlier? It is so absurd. But god, if you love your child as much as I love mine… I would fuckin' hang on for 200 years to look my kid in the eyes again.
And I think about that moment: well, okay, if they are still alive — which no one knows the answer to that question — if that's even a possibility… would he want to see her without her seeing him? And that just moves me emotionally in ways I can't even talk about without tearing up, because of the person he's become. But we're all capable of change. He certainly has changed. And then you can change again.
But it's also 200 years to be haunted by a betrayal.
Fuck, man. That's a long time. And what were the conversations that happened between that discovery, and where we find Cooper Howard, who is reduced to doing pony rides, and lasso tricks, for backyard parties?
