Although various people have been trying to make some form of live-action entertainment out of the hit Fallout video game series for years, none of these projects have even gotten far enough along to ever hire someone to star in the dang thing. Well, until today, when it was announced that Walton Goggins will be playing a leading role in Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s attempt to bring Fallout’s quirky post-apocalypse to life.
Deadline says that while Goggins’ role is unknown, he is “believed to be playing a Ghoul,” which the Fallout fan wiki describes as follows: “Intense and prolonged radiation has ravaged their skin, much of their flesh, and in some cases many of their ligaments. Despite their infertility and in some cases mental deterioration, they have greatly extended overall lifespans and are immune to (and sometimes even healed by) background radiation and/or nuclear fallout.”
Fallout games have traditionally — OK, exclusively — chosen non-radiated faux-zombies as their protagonists, specifically people who have grown up in Vaults, the various fallout shelters survivors entered to avoid a nuclear war that turned America into a wasteland. Making a Ghoul the lead of the Fallout TV show would be a very wild decision for Nolan and Joy to make, given the immense popularity of the games, so I’m assuming Goggins will play one of the Vault-dweller’s companions or perhaps their antagonist.
But there’s honestly no telling, at least for now. Literally all we know about the series is that Nolan and Joy are going to produce it, Captain Marvel writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Silicon Valley co-producer Graham Wagner will be the showrunners, and presumably it will keep the weird 1950s-sci-fi-gone-horribly-wrong vibe of the video games. Still, hiring an actor as talented as Goggins is a very good start.