‘Fallout’s Walton Goggins: “Extremely Anxiety Provoking” To Sit In The Makeup Chair To Become The Ghoul — Contenders TV
13.04.2024 - 19:11
/ deadline.com
Walton Goggins, in a gruesome starring role in Prime Video’s apocalyptic sci-fi series Fallout, said he knew he knew he was in for “an intense experience” having to transform every day on set into The Ghoul, a post-human character with melting flesh, a cowboy persona and some semblance of his humanity still left.
But at Saturday’s Deadline Contenders Television panel, the perennial character actor — beaming in from overseas, where he is shooting The White Lotus — said the task of transformation proved to be “extremely anxiety provoking” at first. He had to figure out how to express himself under a thin layer of sweat-inducing facial prosthesis designed to make him look almost skeletal and how to be a walking, wisecracking horror show with a retainer in his mouth to simulate the absence of teeth.
“When I put in the retainers, these things that kind of covered these pearly white teeth, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t get the words out,” Goggins said on the Fallout panel with co-stars Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten, showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner and production designer Howard Cummings. “I couldn’t get the words out.”
But he and prosthetics designer Vincent Van Dyke developed a rhythm, Goggins said, and what began with five-hour ordeals for a trio of screen tests turned into two-hour turnarounds, and Goggins found his voice as the character in this well-received adaptation of the hit video game franchise. “So we got over all of that,” Goggins said.
The series from Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and their Kilter films joins HBO’s The Last of Us in migrating from consoles to prestige television. Like The Last of Us, Fallout also takes place in the ruins of a civilization that has dropped