Fallout, which started out as a post-apocalyptic video game series, has finally come out of the vault and onto our TV screens.
Prime Video's “Fallout,” from HBO's “Westworld” masterminds Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, transports viewers back to the 1960s and then literally explodes things. The series begins with a shocking nuclear explosion, comparable to the skull-rattling explosion seen in Nolan's brother Christopher's Best Picture winner Oppenheimer, and then jumps more than 200 years into the future. The majority of the show takes place in a retro-futuristic wasteland filled with vault dwellers, psychotic thieves, and irradiated monsters.
Fallout started as a role-playing computer game in 1997 and became popular enough to warrant a sequel a year later. The franchise began with his 2008 “Fallout 3,” which the rights were acquired by video game developer Bethesda, which has produced hits such as the fantasy game “The Elder Scrolls” and, more recently, his sci-fi title “Starfield.” It immediately attracted attention. Bethesda has turned “Fallout” into a vast open-world series, allowing players to make in-game choices that impact key storylines, from controlling the fate of their characters to nuking a town.
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“I used to be a big gamer, and then I had kids. Now they're gamers, so I get to supervise them,” Nolan says. “Chris and I had a Pong set when we were kids. We had a ZX Spectrum, a British-made computer that connected to a TV, and we had a series of games that we loaded from audio tapes. The last time they played a game together was probably when they played the first Halo co-op campaign. Since then we have been playing with his kids and my kids. For us, gaming has always been a part of family life from the beginning. ”
Stars of the TV show “Fallout” Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, and Aaron Moten all had varying degrees of video game knowledge. Although Goggins had “zero” gaming experience (“My experience ended with Galaga”), he learned about Fallout through his 13-year-old son. Morten watched his playthrough of “Fallout” on Twitch, but Parnell encountered some difficulties.
“I'm not a gamer, but I tried playing 'Fallout.' I'm not good at it, and it's frustrating because I'm competitive,” she says. “What I couldn't get the hang of was the control. I can't control my thumb in the right direction.”
To recreate the post-nuclear wasteland of Fallout, the cast, Nolan and showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner traveled to New York, New Jersey, Utah and Namibia's Skeleton Coast. Photographed. They faced truly apocalyptic weather conditions.
“It was a great experience, but I was exhausted at the end of each day. It was fucking hot,” says Goggins, who plays The Ghoul, an undead bounty hunter with prosthetic limbs. “The first day I put it in, [the costume] I think the heat index was 104 or 105 in New York, and we went down and started shooting. One day, Jonah looked at me and said, “I know it's an emotional scene, but are you crying?'' I said, “No, I don't know what you're talking about.'' He reached out his hand and poked me in the eye, and water came gushing out from under this prosthetic limb. ”
It took Goggins five hours to first put on his terrifying ghoul look, and then an hour to look at himself in the mirror and get into character. The “Fallout” prosthetics team was then able to complete his transformation within two hours.
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Parnell's Lucy is a vault dweller who has lived underground all her life, while Morten's Maximus is an armored member of the Brotherhood of Steel, who didn't need such a drastic transformation but did have his own cumbersome costume. I was wearing Morten's power armor was a thick suit of advanced weaponry that weighed him 120 pounds and took him 10 to 12 minutes to put on and take off. Parnell, on the other hand, wore a blue and yellow jumpsuit pulled straight from the video game “Fallout.”
“When you play these games, you don't think about how difficult it is to pee in a jumping suit,” she says. “Then you're working 16 hours a day in a costume, and all of a sudden you're butt naked in a cubicle because you have to take everything off to pee.”
But there was one thing that saved the cast that very hot day.
“It’s an ice pack,” Morten says. “On a large set like ours, there are a lot of people to help you out on any tough day. The action scenes in the sun for this drama will probably be brutally hot.”
Although there were no irradiated monsters or man-eating bandits on set, the scorching heat made the series even more difficult. Parnell thinks it's a good fit. “It’s just like Fallout, right?”
All eight episodes of Fallout are currently available on Prime Video.
