Walton Goggins talks playing the Ghoul on Fallout

In spite of not being much of a “gamer guy,” Walton Goggins sees the Ghoul as a pivotal role for his acting career and public image. Goggins recently sat down with Salon for a tell-all interview regarding his work on the Emmy-nominated Fallout TV show and what it means for the future.

Fallout, which you can watch on Amazon Prime Video, is based on the long-running series of post-apocalyptic video games from Bethesda. But Goggins accepted his role on the show without having any interest in its roots. “I don't know what Fallout is. I don't know the game," he said. "I don't care that it's based on a game. You could do it on a comic book, you could do it on whatever. It just came out of your imagination. If it's with you guys, I'm in.”

However, he would quickly come to realize the character of the Ghoul and his impact on the show’s lore and story was something special. Goggins dove into the scripts and was hooked:

"They said, ‘Well, don't you want to know what you're playing?’ And I said, ‘Sure, but it's irrelevant.’ They said, ‘Well, you're playing a noseless cowboy bounty hunter who's been roaming the post-apocalyptic wasteland for 200 years. You don't have a nose.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you know what? Maybe I should read those scripts. Wait a minute. What?’ But it didn't take me long. Two episodes into reading them, I called them back immediately and I said, ‘I understand what you guys are doing, and I think it's revolutionary, and I'd love to go on this journey with you.’"

Since then, Goggins has been all-in on Fallout, even to the point of risking his mental health to get into character. When asked about the costuming and make-up process for the Ghoul, Goggins described looking at himself without a nose and delving into the character as a whole as an excruciatingly introspective experience, like staring death in the face: ​​”It really is psychological torture.”

"It took five hours the very first time we did it. Jake [Garber, special effects makeup artist] knows me well enough to know that I'm a person that likes to move, and so we built in some time for me to stretch and get my thoughts together. By the time we really got into it, two weeks into the experience, Jake had it down to about two hours and 15 minutes. But every day it was like a transition to, OK, now this is your life for the next two hours and 20 minutes, and this is what it's going to be like for the next 14 hours or however many hours we were working that day."

That said, all the work he’s done on the Ghoul has paid off in spades. Goggins was nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, and even though he ended up losing the award to Shōgun’s Hiroyuki Sanada, he is absolutely thrilled to be in such vaunted company, especially since he was nominated for a role he had no idea about at the start.

"‘Fallout’ is different. I mean, it's a world in and of itself. It's been around for 20, 25 years. It is a beloved game, and it has something that a lot of these other things don't have, and that is a satirical, ‘pull no political punches’ point of view. That humor that is built into the DNA of it that has been a part and parcel of our success, and then certainly Jonathan Nolan's take on it and his execution of it. I expect this will continue."

We certainly hope so, as there’s nothing quite like the way Goggins plays the Ghoul. Luckily, Fallout season 2 starts filming this month!

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