Walton Goggins to play a ghoul in the Fallout TV show

Goggins is the first major cast member to join the Westworld team's spin on the classic video game franchise

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Walton Goggins to play a ghoul in the Fallout TV show
A random picture of Walton Goggins, picked for no particular reason Photo: Ryan Green/ HBO

Jonathan Nolan’s TV adaptation of best-selling post-apocalyptic video game series Fallout has just added its first major cast member, and it’s a hell of a get: Deadline reports that Walton Goggins will star in the Prime Video series.

Details about Goggins’ role—along with basically everything else about the show, beyond what we can logically glean from knowledge of Fallout itself—are being kept under wraps. That being said, it sounds like Goggins will probably be playing a ghoul, long-lived victims of radiation poisoning who sometimes retain their original intelligence, and sometimes are little more than zombies for the player to mow down.

And, look: Walton Goggins is a charming and charismatic actor capable of working as a romantic lead, a cruel antagonist, or cunning comic relief. But we’d be lying if we said we didn’t immediately jump to his spray-tanned-to-leather Baby Billy on HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones when we started imagining Walton Ghoulgins.

The Fallout games take place a few hundred years into America’s future, as humanity slowly crawls out of the irradiated wreckage in a world devastated by nuclear war. Ghouls are an important part of the cosmology of the series, primarily because their slow aging means they’re often the only people still alive from when the bombs fell.

As important as Fallout’s setting is, though, its tone is even more vital: A cynical, somewhat absurd satire of the world we live in now, where people continually stumble right back into the same conflicts that killed the world in the first place. It’s part of what makes Goggins’ casting exciting: It’s hard to think of an actor more capable of walking that key line between the deadly serious and the grimly comic.

Fallout is being produced by Nolan and Lisa Joy via their Kilter Films studio, which also produces their series Westworld for HBO.

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