‘Fallout’ boy: Walton Goggins is reaching new heights — and audiences — with his Ghoul-ish character

Walton Goggins is feeling good — and it’s not because of the Negronis.

Okay, the cocktails probably help, but over a mid-October happy hour of focaccia and burrata at a warmly lit Italian restaurant in New York City’s West Village, the actor is full of humble enthusiasm over the current state of his career. And for good reason: In between seasons of Fallout, the Prime Video series for which he earned his second Emmy nomination this year, he’s found time to return to The Righteous Gemstones (as the impeccably costumed former child star hilariously named Uncle Baby Billy) and snag a coveted spot in the season 3 cast of The White Lotus.

After filming that HBO pop culture phenomenon in Thailand earlier this year, Goggins met up with his New York-based family for a vacation in Turkey. It was during that long-awaited moment to breathe that he got an unexpected but real sense of how much his Fallout performance — as both struggling cowboy actor Cooper Howard and, after a nuclear apocalypse, the irradiated gunslinger the Ghoul — has become a breakout hit with audiences around the globe.

“I’ve been fortunate to get stopped in public for not really one thing but a variety of projects over the years. Then, all of a sudden, people were talking about Fallout more than anything else,” he tells Entertainment Weekly of starring in the video game adaptation. “There was a moment when I was walking down the street with my wife and my son in Istanbul, where within the span of a block, someone from Iraq who was there on vacation came up, someone from Syria came up, and someone from Kurdistan came up. We were walking and eating baklava after having a glass of wine at a restaurant, then there were these three encounters, one right after another. We all looked at each other with such love in our hearts and had long conversations.”

That’s when it hit him: “We did something that is reaching across countries. It’s breaking down those barriers and becoming something that people are sharing in,” he says. “At this stage of my life, I’m grateful to be a part of it.” 

Goggins, 53, is one of film and TV’s most prolific actors currently working. Anyone who’s seen him in anything (perhaps, memorably, as antagonist Boyd Crowder on Justified, which earned him his first Emmy nod in 2011) likely has something nice to say about his charming smile or ability to make even the scummiest characters lovable on screen.

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As Fallout’s the Ghoul, Goggins embodies a ruthlessly skilled warrior. “A studio head once called it ‘competency porn’ to me,” Fallout co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet recalls, speaking to EW during a brief break from season 2 preproduction. “People want to see characters who are good at what they’re doing. That, to me, is the true delight of the Ghoul. It’s so awesome to see [Walton] be so good at this…even if it’s killing.” 

Then there’s the other side of Goggins’ Fallout performance, as Cooper Howard in the show’s pre-apocalyptic flashbacks. 

“It’s really exciting to have our show do something that the games could not do very well, because you can only go to a cutscene so often in a game,” says Goggins’ Fallout costar Aaron Moten, who plays the Brotherhood of Steel squire Maximus. “We get to create this other world, before the bombs dropped.”

Where many videogame adaptations have failed (save the recent run of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and HBO’s The Last of Us), the Fallout series takes full advantage of its creative medium while also managing to capture what players love about the long-running series of open-world role-playing games: Fallout game players are able to choose different paths, like building power armor to join the Brotherhood of Steel or making the most of the protective shelter of the Vaults or taking their chances in the wasteland. The show’s three main characters — Goggins’ the Ghoul, Moten’s Maximus, and Ella Purnell’s newly emerged Vault-dweller Lucy — embody those varying approaches to Fallout’s apocalyptic landscape.

“They’ve all been out on the wasteland a different amount of time,” co-showrunner Graham Wagner says of the show’s main trio (the Ghoul has been there 200-plus years, while Lucy is a newcomer). “There’s that old line, ‘Tell me your zip code, I’ll tell you what you believe.’ Our beliefs and attitudes about the world stem from our environments, and we realized this show was a great opportunity to toy around with that. They’re going to look at things a little differently, and we get to explore a very vast and complicated world through three different perspectives and cover more ground more quickly.”

Playing the video game doesn’t require an understanding of what it means to live through a world-changing event. But in March 2020 the world screeched to a halt, and the COVID-19 lockdowns provided a whole new perspective for the Fallout creative team as they developed the series.

“When the pandemic hit, we talked a lot about how it felt like we had turned into Vault-dwellers,” says Robertson-Dworet, who crafted the show with Wagner and executive producer Jonathan Nolan. “We were in hiding as all the essential workers were taking the risks for us to keep things going. People were saying, ‘It’s good to stay home,’ and yet you felt cowardly doing it,” continues the Captain Marvel co-screenwriter. “That affected how we related to Lucy. In fact, we worried a lot about [if she was] too annoying, since she came from this world of privilege where people got to hide. But Ella brought such humanity to the performance. There’s a sweetness to the way she manifests her naïveté that, thank God, people did not find annoying.”

In fact, when talking to EW ahead of Fallout’s premiere this spring, Purnell had the perfect description of Lucy: “Leslie Knope meets Ned Flanders, but in the apocalypse.”

That last part is the most important, because over the course of season 1, Lucy learns a lot more about her world in a way that changes her. In our real world, different explanations and conspiracy theories still swirl about what exactly caused the COVID-19 pandemic. But the show Fallout differs from the games by telling us what catalyzed their apocalypse: The corporation that built the Vaults in the first place!

“Corporations present an interesting problem because they are these organisms that are only interested in their own survival, and their one duty is to keep making their shareholders money at all costs,” Robertson-Dworet says. “That is a very problematic thing in a world where they are the most powerful entities. That was something that we thought was worth writing about.”

Adds Wagner, “And it’s fun for us to be like, ‘And we’re going to put it all on Amazon Prime!’”

Enmeshed as they are in preparations for season 2, Robertson-Dworet and Wagner are careful not to say anything too revealing. But they are willing to tease one tidbit: There’s more story to tell about Barb (Frances Turner), Cooper Howard’s wife, who worked for Vault-Tec before the apocalypse.

Goggins has a more practical consideration as he prepares for season 2. Returning to Fallout means returning to the makeup chair, where it takes hours to apply his Ghoul getup before every day of shooting. “I am really scared about getting back into those prosthetics,” he says with a laugh in between bites of burrata. “It’s that old saying where someone asks, ‘Why did you decide to have a second kid?’ Because you totally forgot what it was like to have the first!”

But in this case, the first has been a golden child.