We are now just a little more than a couple weeks away from the debut of Fallout Season 2, and while there are many aspects of the show anticipated in the new run of episodes, there is no question that the continuing adventures of Walton Goggins' The Ghoul is ranked high among them. In addition to having an eye-opening appearance, the character was revealed to have a magnificent complexity in Season 1, and that's really well reflected in the actor's comments about the day he discovered he was truly playing two parts on the terrific Prime Video series.
In a career retrospective interview with Walton Goggins posted by Vanity Fair, the actor discusses his special experience playing The Ghoul in Fallout – and he notes that it was a strange day when he first got the opportunity to play the character in the 21st century flashbacks where he is known as silver screen legend Cooper Howard. Discussing the scene, he recalls not putting too much emphasis on it... but that was mostly because he didn't want it to cause him undue anxiety. Said Goggins,
This was the very first day that I played Cooper Howard. I had been The Ghoul up until that point. I knew this day was coming. I didn't really think about it that much, I didn't want to get in my head, but being in the makeup chair only took 15 minutes that day. Whereas becoming The Ghoul took like two-and-a-half hours, two hours and 40 minutes at that point.
The idea of two-and-a-half hours in a makeup chair sounds pretty unpleasant, so you'd think that it would have been a relief for Walton Goggins to have that cut out of his schedule. That relief was short-lived, however, as it was as soon as he started to make his way toward set that he was hit with the realization that he was going to have a very different kind of day working on Fallout.
Goggins is widely recognized as one of the industry's greatest character actors, and audiences have seen him pull off some extraordinary performances during his decades-long career... but he nonetheless felt like he was missing a part of himself the first day that he was playing Cooper Howard instead of The Ghoul:
And I'll never forget walking out of the makeup trailer and feeling the air on my face, thinking 'Oh my god, I don't have my armor. It's just me.' And I'd grown so accustomed to being able to shut everybody out because the makeup just shuts them out for me, and thinking 'I don't even know if I can do this. I don't even know who this person is.' And I didn't have long to figure it out.
The good news? He figured it out. The scene in question features Cooper witnessing a nuclear bomb detonating and kicking off the Great War of 2077, and not only is Goggins amazing in that scene, but all of his flashback work is just as great as his time as the mutant assassin known as The Ghoul.
In Fallout Season 2, The Ghoul will be heading with Ella Purnell's Lucy MacLean on a trip to Las Vegas in part so that he can finally exact revenge against Kyle MacLachlan's Hank McLean. How will it all pan out? We'll start getting answers to that question on December 17 with the premiere episode. If you need a refresher, Fallout Season 1 is streamable with an Amazon Prime subscription.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
