Fallout’s Walton Goggins in preparation to play a Ghoul

Most people plan to show up to a new job well-prepared—but few are as prepared to work as Walton Goggins did. It falls. In a new interview, the actor talked about how he came up with his Emmy-nominated performance, which brings different and complex layers to the character who begins in the show’s timeline as a 1950s movie boy, then appears centuries later as a man without a nose. to violate the law of navigation in nuclear contaminated areas.

Speaking to Vulture, Goggins—a seasoned actor who has been creating memorable characters on TV for a long time. (Justified, Deadwood, The Righteous Gemstones, The Shield, Invincible) and in the movies (Predators, The Hateful Eight, Ant-Man and the Wasp)-looked inside his casting process. To say that it is thorough and detailed would be an understatement.

“[I] I watched a lot of movies I’ve seen before in preparation for this, kind of watching not so much Ghoul, although that was part of it, but Cooper Howard. He is a star of the western movies of the 1950s. So I really wanted to understand who his contemporaries were. What jobs did he lose? What jobs did he get?,” Goggins told Vulture.

He reflected on Howard’s path to Hollywood stardom—in Goggins’ mind, he was a romantic boy who was good at riding horses and just fell into show biz—and studied, in particular, Henry Fonda Once Upon a Time in the West and Paul Newman Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He also read the book It falls 250 times, something he learned to do from his former co-star Anthony Hopkins, and that helps him absorb the story in an intuitive way: “Your ego really has to get out of the way.”

Going straight into the Ghoul concept, Goggins really focuses on the mental shift that Howard made all those years in the post-apocalypse. “Whenever you say, on paper, Oh, he’s been alive for 200 years. That’s hard to wrap your head around,” Goggins said.

He continued. “I don’t think of it in those terms. It’s like, let’s split these 200 years. What does that really look like? Day 1: What happened after the bomb fell? Did he wake up after five days? Did you get up quickly? … Then I thought, what was it like the first time someone tried to kill him to get food or water, to get resources? OK? What was it like the first day he killed someone for those very things? And the breakdown of true morality—what is your true north? And the disintegration of all he knew. He goes from good behavior to a happy life.”

It falls the first season is streaming on Prime Video; The Ghoul’s journey will continue in the second season.

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