New FALLOUT Series Details Offer Insight on Walton Goggins' Character The Ghoul

One of the most interesting characters being introduced in the upcoming Fallout series is Walton Goggins’ character named The Ghoul, who is described as a wild card character in the series and a sinister bounty hunter.

The Ghoul is a “gruesomely scarred roughrider who has a code of honor, but also a ruthless streak. He is the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly all rolled into one.” The character is a survivor who has existed for hundreds of years and the series will offer insight into his past with flashbacks of the “human being he once was, a father and husband named Cooper Howard, before the nuclear holocaust turned the world into a cinder and transformed him into an undead, noseless sharp-shooting fiend.”

Walton’s The Ghoul is not like the Ghouls in the game. His character is a legend, and is “distinct among his kind for his cleverness and cunning.” There’s still a part of his old self in this horrible form he now finds himself in.

Series co-creator and director Jonathan Nolan talked about Walton’s casting and the character, saying: “Walton’s equally adept at drama and comedy, which is so difficult. There is a chasm in time and distance between who this guy was and who he’s become, which for me creates an enormous dramatic question: What happened to this guy? So we’ll walk backwards into that.”

He goes on to compare The Ghoul to the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno: “He becomes our guide and our protagonist in that [older] world, even as we understand him to be the antagonist at the end of the world.”

As for the look of The Ghoul, the character had to be different than the average Ghoul because his is smarter. They had to give us a different physique and face. Nolan also explained: “You have to be extremely careful with it when you’re putting a full appliance on someone’s face, because you hired that actor for a reason. Their face is their instrument. [You want] the tiny little expressions and changes that they make.”

The look of the character was created by prosthetics designer Vincent Van Dyke, and when talking about the design, Nolan shared: “I need to be able to see Walton and his performance, he needs to look like a Ghoul from the game, and he needs to be kind of hot.”

Nolan went on to talk about the first day they were shooting with Walton, and he said: “The first day we were shooting with Walton in makeup, he comes to set and I’m looking at him, like, ‘Walton…are you crying?’ He just had sweat leaking out of the prosthetics under his eyes because it was so hot.”

It’s also explained that The Ghoul is damaged and hardened by his centuries of endless life in a state of near-death. The filmmaker said: “He’s got a lot of mileage on him, but he’s still got a swagger and kind of a charm to him.”

Nolan talked about maintaining the grim aspects of the world, saying: “It’s a dark world in many ways. But the games were fun to play, fun to explore, and I think that was a mandate for us: to make sure that it was enjoyable to spend time in this universe.”

The story centers on Lucy, who “has lived her entire life inside a subterranean vault, where every need and want has been satisfied while generations and generations await the day when it is safe to surface.”

It’s explained that “When a crisis forces Lucy to venture above on a rescue mission, she finds that the planet above remains a hellscape crawling with giant insects, voracious mutant animal ‘abominations,’ and a human population of sunbaked miscreants who make the manners, morals, and hygiene of the gunslinging Old West look like Downton Abbey… The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,” Nolan tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look.”

Lucy is described as being nice, but naive. “In the Fallout universe, the human beings fortunate enough to ride out the apocalypse in underground communities only had that option available to them because they had money. Forcing doe-eyed Lucy out into this sadistic, Darwinian remnant of civilization opens the door for Fallout to engage in some social satire as well as action and adventure.”

Source: Vanity Fair