Video game adaptations are having a moment. Following years of hit or miss screen translations, the success of series like The Last of Us has opened the door for a whole host of other video games to receive the serious screen adaptations they deserve, including Bethesda’s long-running post-apocalyptic franchise Fallout.
Rather than a straight adaptation of any one of Bethesda’s RPGs, which rely largely on player choice, the Fallout TV series is a new story sitting in the canon of the same world. Set in 2296, Fallout takes place 9 years after Fallout 4 and is set in a part of the nuclear-ravaged USA that hasn’t been seen before – California.
This world will be familiar to those who have played the Fallout games, but also serves as a fresh slate for any newcomers, allowing a look into the different factions of this post-apocalyptic world via the intertwining stories of three major characters.
One of these is Lucy, a vault-dweller who emerges from the safe confines of Vault 33 to track down her missing father, undertaking a treacherous journey across the wasteland. Fallout cast member Ella Purnell is no stranger to video game adaptations, having voiced Jinx in Arcane: League of Legends, nor is she a stranger to survivor characters, having also played Jackie in Yellowjackets, where she was dropped into the winter Canadian wilderness.
“Looking back, definitely the theme of survival I think just fascinates me really,” Purnell said. “It’s fun comparing Jackie and Lucy because in many ways they are quite similar. They know exactly who they are, how their life is gonna pan out and then they get put in this horrible horrific situation and [are] pushed to the brink – and they both react in completely different ways. But it was nice to sort of start from that same place and then find a different pathway.”
This journey through the harsh wasteland is one that has an undeniable impact on Lucy, who has been raised within the idealistic values of the vault community, under the kindly eye of her overseer father, Hank. Despite Lucy being cut-off from the realities of the surface for her entire life, it’s a journey that Kyle MacLachan likes to think her father prepared her for.
“I think Hank has, inadvertently in some ways, helped educate, bring up his daughter to be able to do anything. He’s definitely got skills and abilities that he is helping her with, so that she can potentially survive were something to happen and I think that’s an intentional plan,” MacLachlan said. “So he’s quite capable himself and he would be very proud of how his daughter has existed in her time on the surface.”
Going on a similar journey of self-discovery is Aaron Moten’s Maximus, an aspirant of the Brotherhood of Steel, a faction that is devoted to collecting and preserving pre-apocalypse tech.
The Brotherhood of Steel are synonymous with the Fallout games, their iconic power armour often plastered on marketing for the franchise. But is the armour as fun to wear in real life as it is in the games?
“We have different different versions of the armour. We have a lot of things that come together to bring it to life,” Moten explained. “I get to wear what is known as the top half of the suit. It’s so massive that my fingers are dragging on the ground, it weighs 50 to 60 pounds (20 to 25kg). The helmet visor operates on it and that is really fun.”
“What I cannot wear is what our amazing stunt performer Adam Shippey wears, which is massive. He’s seven foot six inches in this whole thing, with the platforms. That whole suit is around 120 pounds (55kg) or something crazy like that. It’s amazing though, [for that] piece to be practical,” he added.
Early on in the season, Maximus is implicated in a crime with one of the other Brotherhood aspirants, which Moten said is a strong introduction into the skewed morality of the Fallout world:
“For those who don’t know the tone of Fallout, it’s the start of understanding the depth and complexities of different characters, [particularly] everyone who’s been born and raised in the wasteland, which is a part of the world perspective that Maximus shares with the audience,” the actor explained.
“We have a moral compass that is tilted and it’s different from the world that we live in today, and I think it also makes our characters capable of almost anything.”
One character who perhaps exemplifies this the most is Walton Goggins’ Ghoul, a wasteland term for those who have had prolonged exposure to radiation and have seen their bodies (and sometimes minds) ravaged for it. To achieve this look in the Fallout TV series, it was a long day in the makeup chair for Goggins.
“Initially it took five hours, but by the time we were rolling and we were a few weeks into production, we had gotten it down to 1 hour 45 minutes. So it was it was intense, for sure,” Goggins said. “But luckily there were breaks in there, because I also play this guy, Cooper Howard, who was the Ghoul before the bombs dropped. So there was kind of a welcome break from how profoundly sad this person was.”
“[The makeup] was not easy, the heat was pretty intense at times. But you know, the thing is, I would do it all over again,” he added.
The whole Fallout TV universe has been overseen by three shepherds of Hollywood TV, who also happen to be big gamers themselves. One of those is Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan, who serves as an executive producer and director of the first three episodes in the season, and the other two are showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley), the latter of whom has been a stout Bethesda fan for decades.
“I’ve been playing Bethesda games since [The Elder Scrolls] Arena. I even played their driving racing game,” Wagner said. “…I think sometimes of Todd Howard as like the Lorne Michaels of the video game world in that he sort of oversees the creation of so much stuff.”
When it came to creatively setting up an adaptation that would not just please fans of the game but serve as a satisfying television experience, Wagner said they were careful not to throw everything Fallout is known for at the wall at once.
“You gotta leave something in the tank, you know? If we weren’t careful, in the first four episodes we would’ve just burned through them all,” Wagner explained.
“You can play a single installation of Fallout for hundreds if not, for some people, thousands of hours, and we have eight hours of a TV show. So patience became the name of the game. Kind of trying not to cram it all in and just trust that we’ll get to things when we can get to them in a way that is the most impactful. So there’s a handful of things we didn’t get to in season 1 and fingers are firmly crossed that we get a second chance to get into more of it.”
More seasons of Fallout are already looking promising, but for those hoping for a hint of what’s to come in the future, the showrunner recommended staying for the closing credits of each episode.
“We were very excited to add an extra little chunk at the end and we felt like it was an opportunity to kind of stick around for a bit longer and live in the world of the show and to show parts of the world that are coming down the pipe in future episodes as well,” Wagner teased.
All episodes of Fallout are streaming on Prime Video (a little bit earlier) on April 11.
Image: Prime Video
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