Take one nuclear apocalypse, add a devastated wasteland, a society cleaved in two, mutated monsters, a whole lot of violence and tie it all together with the creator of Westworld. Welcome to Fallout, Prime Video’s newest blockbuster TV series – it’s dystopian sci-fi, but not as we know it.
Of course, it’s not just TV. The Fallout franchise is one of gaming’s most iconic and has been going for more than 20 years. Set in a retro futurist America, 200 years after a massive nuclear apocalypse wiped out most of the earth’s population in 2077, its sprawling world and largely anonymous heroes mean it’s never been adapted for screen before.
That is, until Jonathan Nolan, the creator of Westworld and brother of director Christopher, came along. Naturally, Nolan is a massive Fallout fan. “These are just incredibly addictive, life-destroying, all-encompassing, brilliant video games,” he says.
“And I felt after putting 40 hours in Fallout 3 that [creator] Todd Howard owed me something. And so we sat down and hashed it out.”
This resulting take on the video game franchise’s lore (which combines the talents of both Nolan and Howard) keeps the setting, but invents an entirely new cast of characters.
"In most of the games, you start with a vault character," says co-producer Graham Wagner. Here, that would be Lucy (Ella Purnell), who has grown up in the isolated underground Vaults that protected a lucky few thousand when the end of the world rolled around.
At the start of the series, she sets out to see the world – only to discover it’s a lot more horrifying than she ever imagined. "Lucy starts out with her morality perfectly intact; she grew up in a sealed Ziploc bag essentially,” Wagner adds; needless to say, that’s no longer the case by the end of the show.
"She's basically someone who would star in a toothpaste commercial but could also kill you. I was like, 'I'm in. I am 100 percent in. Sign me up,’” Purnell says. “They described her as a Leslie Knope/Ned Flanders-type, but with something kind of dangerous lurking there.”
The same goes for the type of people she encounters. As Lucy ventures out into what’s left of America, “we're introduced to what society has been reduced to,” says Kyle MacLachlan, who plays Lucy’s father Hank.
"There are survivors living in vaults underground, away from radiation, doing the best that they can with a can-do American attitude. The rest of the world has been banished to the surface of the planet, which is full of strange creatures, horrendous destruction and survivors are forced to do horrible things just to stay alive."
There are also plenty of competing factions to contend with. On the one hand, there’s the cult-like Brotherhood of Steel, which is trying to take control of the wasteland for itself. On the other, there’s the Ghoul, played by Walton Goggins. Ghouls, as Fallout fans will know, are the mutated, zombie-like humans that haunt the wastelands, but the showrunners were adamant that this time around, they were going to make one into a main character.
"It was important to us that we dramatise the life of the least fortunate of the surface dwellers in the game, which are the Ghouls," says showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
"We've always thought it was fascinating that they are often quite miserable as their bodies decay, but they have these incredibly long lifespans and so they know the history of the wasteland to a large extent. That was the inspiration for the character.”
Enter the Ghoul. Though he’s introduced to Lucy, and us, as a bounty hunter, the show also makes time to explore his backstory as former movie star Cooper Howard, who was transformed into a mutated monster 219 years ago and has remained that way since thanks to the radiation permeating the atmosphere.
With a world as beautiful and devastated as that of Fallout, the showrunners also had their work cut out finding places to shoot. "We got really into the look of the games and knew we had to adhere to the established history the game created," says set designer Howard Cummings.
"We talked about the importance of giving everything a sense of scale, and we shot in distant locations like Africa for the wastelands and we used digital stages to create some of the massive rooms for the vaults and other post-apocalyptic structures.
That went from the scrap-metal town of Filly, which was 48 feet high and made from “real junk” welded together, to Namibia, where filming took place in the now-abandoned diamond mining village of Kolmanskop, and the rust-red beaches of the Skeleton coast.
"On the second day, we were shooting at this abandoned diamond refinery right on the coast, and someone wandered over and told us, no one's ever shot there before" says Nolan. "That was a unique experience for us. I've never shot somewhere so remote, where literally the only things there are hyenas. It's an incredibly beautiful and strange place."
It paid off: Robertson-Dworet talks about the “Christmas morning face” that the Bethesda team would get when they visited the set – especially the franchise creator Todd Howard.
"He was sort of rubbing his hands on a wall and said, 'They got the texture right!'” adds Wagner.
And as for the monsters? There’s plenty of those too. In addition to deranged robots and Ghouls, there are also the salamander-like Gulpers that haunt the wastelands in search of prey to eat – which Nolan and his team built for real.
"The Gulper is a feature of Fallout 4; this kind of grotesque newt kind of amphibian thing and my contribution to it was we wanted to build that practically," he says.
"My addition was an idea that I sort of came up with looking at the Gulper's rows of weird-looking teeth. I thought, what if the teeth were actually fingers and the way that it eats is it just kind of wriggles things down and gulps them down? I brought something into the world that should be erased because it's so disgusting, but I'm also perversely very proud of it."
Though Fallout is set so far in the future, the cast are also adamant that it has plenty of relevance to the present day, too.
"We live in a very, very chaotic time. We're seeing an erosion of morality and an erosion of optimism. And it's really unfortunate, but [Fallout] is reflecting in some ways the world that is developing around us,” says Goggins.
“I hope we don't go any further than that, and we just stick to where we are, but that's what's so interesting to me about the show, the questions that it poses. And so, I'm just so curious how the rebuilding of society happens in this game and in this story as it goes forward."
The glossary cheat sheet
Brotherhood of Steel: militaristic, cultish group who endeavour to restore order to the surface by taking power for themselves.
Ghoul: unpredictable, mutated humans that appear/exist in various stages of external decay.
Great War: the name given to the apocalyptic events on October 23, 2077.
Gulper: a giant mutated salamander that happily hunts and feeds on human flesh.
RadAway: brand name drug that fights off/eliminates radiation in the body/bloodstream.
Smoothskin: slang word for normal humans, generally used by ghouls.
Vault dweller: aka "Vaultie" or "Vaulter" refers to the privileged few who have been sheltered from the horrors of the Great War living hundreds of feet below the surface in their own idyllic, orderly underground world.
Vault-Tec: the pre-war defense corporation that designed and sold the Vaults to protect a portion of the population in the event of a nuclear holocaust.
Wasteland: general term for the lawless irradiated surface of earth following the Great War.
