An unrecognisable Walton Goggins blows fans away in first Fallout trailer

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Fans are particularly excited about Walton Goggins’s performance in Amazon Prime Video’s forthcoming Fallout TV series, which just aired its first trailer.

The show is an adaptation of the popular post-apocalyptic video game series, which first launched in 1997 and has gone on to sell millions of copies worldwide.

Goggins plays a character known as The Ghoul, and is seen in the trailer both before and after the nuclear apocalypse that transformed him into an irradiated figure with no nose.

On X/Twitter, one fan wrote: “Walton Goggins is the hero Fallout wants, needs, and deserves.”

Another added: “This looks amazing! Plus more cowboy/outlaw Walton Goggins? I’m in!”

While a third observed that now is a “great time to be both a massive Walton Goggins fan and a massive Fallout fan”.

Gizmodo reports that Goggins teased more information about his mysterious character at a recent press event, saying: “The Ghoul is, in some ways, the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. He’s the guide, if you will, through this irradiated hellscape that we find ourselves in in this post-apocalyptic world.

“He is a bounty hunter... he is pragmatic, he is ruthless, he has his own set of moral codes, and he has a wicked sense of humor. Much like me!”

Fallout was developed for television by Westworld showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. It stars Goggins, Ella Purnell, and Kyle MacLachlan.

Speaking to Vanity Fair last year, Nolan said that although the series is set in a dystopian future ravaged by nuclear war, its story will speak to contemporary political issues.

“The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,” said Nolan.

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“We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way,” he continued. “I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.’”

As well as adapting Westworld for television, Nolan also co-written films including The Prestige, The Dark Knight and Interstellar in collaboration with his brother Christopher Nolan.

Game-maker Todd Howard, who directed 2008’s Fallout 3 and 2015’s Fallout 4 video games, told the magazine that Fallout developers Bethesda Game Studios have worked closely with the showrunners to ensure the series is in keeping with the tone of the games.

“We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence,” said Howard, who is an executive producer of the show.

“Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and post-apocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show.”