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While the star of Fallout may be the action unfolding in the California wasteland and all of the interesting/terrifying creatures and people that inhabit it, there’s so much more at play in Season 1 of the Prime Video adaptation.
One primary mystery that unravels throughout all eight of Season 1’s episode is the backstory of movie star Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) and how he became The Ghoul, an irradiated mutant bounty hunter.
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Now Playing: (SPOILERS) FALLOUT Stars Break Down the Fight in Filly
Warning: The following contains spoilers from Season 1 of Prime Video’s Fallout. If you have yet to watch the series, stop reading now.
In the first episode of Fallout, we learn Howard is down on his luck, seemingly being labeled as sympathetic to the Communist Party. It’s reminiscent of the blackball era of Hollywood, in which actors, writers, directors, and others in the industry were forced out of it due to suspected Communist ties.
In Fallout, Cooper is one of those people. Now, instead of making movies, he appears in-costume at children’s birthday parties to make ends meet. Then the bombs drop and a much more grim future takes hold.
At the end of Season 1, we still don’t know how, exactly, Cooper survived the bombs and is still alive (technically) hundreds of years later. However, we do see how that time has hardened him, making him an entirely different man from before the apocalypse. However, there’s a moment in Episode 4, “The Ghouls,” where we see Goggins’ character almost begin to resemble Cooper once more, after finding one of his old movies on a video tape and watching it.
It’s a striking scene, as the dour and deadly Ghoul is mesmerized by his former self, almost reveling in it. When GameSpot had the chance to speak with Goggins about the series, we couldn’t help asking what was going through The Ghoul’s mind in that moment.
“I mean, it’s 1000 things, isn’t it?” Goggins wondered. “No, it’s funny. It’s comforting. It’s shocking. It is, you know, nostalgic for a world that could no longer exist. And then [he’s] just kind of in awe of, like, you know, it’s just spending time with himself but you’re spending time with his entire world outside of making this movie. Those things can be very painful.”
And while they’re painful, they also bring joy to The Ghoul, as Goggins recounts, “It was such a great day that day because of what preceded–finding that tape and then and then having that moment.”
What surprised the actor, though, was how touching it would be to film that moment.
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“I just didn’t anticipate really what was gonna happen. I just let it happen in the moment,” Goggins said. “And it was real to me, you know, and I don’t think there’s one word you can use to describe it. How do you look back on your life in a photo? As an adult, I look back at pictures of myself when I was four years old sometimes when I’m having a bad day. Or [you] come across it when you’re cleaning out a closet and you find a photo. And it’s like, ‘Wow, how did I get to where I am now?’ And that’s what that was, my life on that day. It’s no different right? It happens. Happens all the time.”
For The Ghoul, though, it’s a bittersweet moment. While reliving his glory days brings a small escape from the constant chaos, it doesn’t diminish his resolve at all. By the end of Season 1, we know exactly what The Ghoul’s endgame is–and it’s one he won’t give up on. He wants to find what happened to his family and will stop at nothing to get answers.
And knowing what we know about The Ghoul–and his wife, a VaultTec employee seemingly complicit in the plan to drop bombs in the United States–there’s no telling what a meeting between the two would look like. What’s more, we have no idea if his wife or daughter are even alive, or how that could be possible after a couple hundred years.
Hopefully, though, we will get the chance to find out in a future season.
