Season one of Prime Video’s “Fallout” is one of the top three most-watched shows for the streamer. As season two hits Australian screens this week, and a third season already greenlit, star Walton Goggins said they are just getting started.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone AU/NZ during a recent trip to Australia, Goggins, who scored an Emmy nomination as the Hollywood actor-turned-ghoul, Cooper Howard, in season one, said the show, based on the popular video game series, is as impressive as any of the other major shows he’s been on like “The White Lotus” and “The Righteous Gemstones”.
“I’ve been very fortunate over the course of my career. I’ve done, I don’t know how many movies, I’ve done a lot of television, and in this space, what I do know that is that if you were able to build a critical mass in the first chapter of a story, I’m not even gonna say a season because to me that just makes it TV [and] I don’t believe that there is a difference… you have an extraordinary opportunity in the second chapter of that story to do something transcendent,” he said.
“You can play it safe or you can do what most of the writers that I’ve been associated with or collaborated with over the years, and that is you can go for broke. You can lean right into it and expand upon this world in ways that you didn’t think possible, and that’s the choice that [executive producer Jonathan Nolan and show creators Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet] decided to take this in.
“I was so grateful for the effort put in by everyone in season one. Looking at it now, it feels like it’s the overture, like it’s just the beginning. We really begin to look under the covers in this second iteration of this experience, and we know now that we have a season three, so the story will continue.”
Goggins has previously revealed he has never played the video game and does not intend to. The reason? It’s all about the story.
“It has to be your own experience, and I believe that I would be doing a disservice to this community of people if I were to become as big a fan of the game as the players of this game, right?” he said.
“I would be compromised, and I wouldn’t hold these scripts, these stories up to the same standard, and I think a lot of us feel that way.
“Everybody above my pay grade makes sure that this world is filled out with a texture that is this world. We’re not stepping out of that lane. But I believe that Cooper Howard is real. I believe that the Ghoul is real. So, to play the game… that just wouldn’t be good for me.”