MEXICO CITY— Time to don radiation protective suits and try to find shelter, the nuclear apocalypse of “Fallout” debuts on television, 27 years after the release of the original video game, in a series with a scale as expansive as the game with parts equal parts bloody action and humor.
“We filmed in New York, in Utah, in Namibia; We did some scenes in Los Angeles, we were really all over the place,” executive producer Graham Wagner said in a recent video call interview ahead of the series’ premiere Wednesday on the Prime Video streaming service. “It’s the biggest project I’ve worked on to date.”
Wagner, who has previously worked on projects such as “The Office”, “Portlandia” and “Silicon Valley”, is one of the millions of video game fans around the world.
“I’ve been playing the video game since 1997, so you try not to get excited, but no one believes it,” he said of his reaction to learning that he would be in charge of turning it into a series.
“I was very excited to do this, especially considering that I knew the game so well and I knew that there was no way to do ‘Fallout’ without a little bit of satire in it, a little bit of humor. For me it was the perfect project, I hope the public agrees,” added Wagner, who is one of the creators of the series along with producer Geneva Robertson-Dworet (“Captain Marvel” and “Tomb Raider”).
In the case of director Jonathan Nolan, his first contact with the franchise was when playing “Fallout 3.”
“I marveled at the storytelling, the expansive, epic qualities of the world, and the unique tone with equal parts darkness and absurdity; I had never experienced anything like it,” she recalled.
For Nolan, who has previously directed productions such as “Westworld” and “Person of Interest,” what attracted him most was the comedy tone of the series and even leaving the script aside at times to play with the interpretation.
“This opportunity for me, my first, to do comedy and work with an incredible cast,” he said. “It’s very rare for me and to play with that fun and humor in so many moments was extraordinary.”
Fallout takes place more than 200 years after a nuclear war broke out in 2077 that has left radioactive humans known as ghouls or ghouls who, despite their zombie-like appearance, have anti-aging qualities that make them live much longer than the average man. Such is the case of The Ghoul, the character played by Walton Goggins, who is a cowboy actor at the time of the war and two centuries later is wanted for his abilities as an outlaw.
Goggins had heard about the game from his 13-year-old gamer son, but had not played it.
“I had no idea how important it is to so many people in the world, I think if I had known, maybe I would have had a panic attack, maybe I wouldn’t have accepted it,” he said jokingly. “Once it was revealed to me and I really understood the place it has in the hearts of so many people, I decided not to play it… I didn’t want to be influenced by the video game and I wanted to have my own interpretation.”
It took Goggins hours to get ready with the makeup that gives him the appearance of a ghoul, but the final result made his interpretation easier. The first time they put it on, he said he asked for some time alone before putting on the costume to see what it would be like to move in it.
“This was extreme, I had never done something like this for so long,” he noted. “The benefit of being The Ghoul was how isolated I was in the prosthetics and I’m a storyteller who likes to be alone on set… It made it exponentially easier in that makeup.”
He also had the opportunity to show off his cowboy lasso skills while riding a horse.
“I had done it before because I love horses and all that stuff,” he said. “It is the simplest and at the same time the most complicated thing I have had to learn in my life; It took me so long to even get close to achieving it, but we had a great time.”
After the nuclear disaster, shelters are built where several generations have grown up. Each shelter has its supervisor and, to avoid inbreeding, marriages are occasionally made between inhabitants of different shelters, without much romance, but with the promise of producing new inhabitants who will repopulate the planet when the radiation decreases.
This is how we meet Lucy (Ella Purnell), a young woman from shelter 33, on her wedding day with a stranger from shelter 32. Her father, Supervisor Hank, assures her that everything will be fine, but things get out of control when the groom and their guests begin to attack them and take Hank hostage to the surface, known as the Wasteland. Lucy decides to undertake a solo mission to rescue her father.
“It was very interesting for me, when I read the pilot, to see what happens to Lucy when she sees the surface, the Wasteland, for the first time, she has no idea that there is life on the surface, everything that she believed and everything. what they told her falls apart,” said Purnell, actress of series such as “Yellowjackets,” “Star Trek: Prodigy” and the animated “Arcane.”
“Strength can be seen in a thousand different ways, it doesn’t always have to be physical… When she could have broken, she didn’t, she put one foot in front of the other and kept going.”
For other characters like the young paramilitary Maximus (Aaron Moten), life in the Wasteland has shaped his character into an ambiguous character. Maximus dreams of becoming an officer in power armor, a kind of human tank operated by higher-ranking combatants, without caring how he should achieve it.
“His life has been difficult and I think his moral compass is shaped by the Wasteland, more so than the world we live in now,” said Moten, who has acted in films such as “Emancipation” and Father Stu (“The Miracle of Father Stu”). “I think he struggles to make the decision whether he is noble or someone who seeks glory and seeks to climb the ranks to survive, perhaps in his case it is noble to make the decision that it is about survival, even if that is a violent decision.” ”.
Nothing is as it seems in the world of “Fallout”, Ov
erseer Hank is shown as an optimist and a victim of a group of vandals, but for actor Kyle MacLachlan who plays him that is not the only thing in his story.
“I can assure you that there are definitely some things that happened in the origin of this character behind the cameras,” said the star of films like “The Doors,” “Dune” (“Dune”) and “Blue Velvet” (“Blue Velvet”). “). “He is a man who has a bigger mission, there is something bigger going on there that we discover as we progress through the story.”
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