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This article contains spoilers for Fallout season 2 episode 4.
Playing the wrinkled, irradiated Ghoul on Prime Video’s game adaptation Fallout is not a walk in the post-apocalyptic park for Walton Goggins. Not only does the actor have to access the emotional interiority of a centuries-old cowboy wandering the wasteland, he has to undergo a grueling physical transformation as well. Per Goggins, getting into the Ghoul’s noseless skin can take up to three hours.
Thankfully, Fallout provides a second character for Goggins to play as well: the Ghoul’s pre-apocalypse identity of soldier-turned-actor-turned-corporate-pitchman Cooper Howard. Armed with only a suit, some finger guns, and a smile; Cooper Howard is usually a cozier experience for Goggins. That wasn’t the case, however, with the opening scene of season 2 episode 4.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve done here,” Goggins tells Den of Geek. “It was the most claustrophobic experience I’ve ever hard. I thought that was The Ghoul, but it wasn’t. It was donning that suit.”
“The suit” in question is the T-45 power armor developed by defense contractor West Tek in the Fallout canon. Now the preferred kit of the Brotherhood of Steel in the Wasteland, the bulky T-45 suit previously protected America’s soldiers in the battle against communism before the nukes dropped. Or at least it was supposed to protect them. As the Ghoul revealed to Maximus (Aaron Moten) in season 1, the T-45 has some weak points and a tendency to glitch in the worst possible moments. We see that play out in the opening minutes of season 2 episode 4 as Cooper’s T-45 is rendered completely inoperable right before a critical encounter with Chinese soldiers on the Alaskan battle front.
“The way in which that particular story dovetails into the larger narrative was so exciting to me,” Goggins says. “It’s hinted at in season one that Cooper Howard was in the military. He speaks about the power armor – this piece of technology and the problems that it has. And then you get to experience that in a flashback, which is even earlier than the world before the bombs drooped. It’s the furthest we have gone back in history.”
The episode opener isn’t just the furthest that the Fallout TV series has ventured into the past, it also serves as the proper introduction to one of the games’ most popular cryptids: the hulking Deathclaw that becomes the fallen Howard’s unlikely salvation. But what exactly is a seemingly mutated giant lizard doing in distant past long before the bombs dropped and Godzilla-fied the environment? It’s a question that Goggins himself is eager to the get to the bottom to. As long as it doesn’t involve donning that armor once again.
“I’m happy that we did it. If we don’t do it again, that’ll be OK,” he says.
New episodes of Fallout season 2 premiere Wednesdays on Prime Video, culminating with the finale on February 4.
The post Walton Goggins Reveals His Hardest Fallout Acting Challenge Yet appeared first on Den of Geek.
