Concisely describing Walton Goggins’ Ghoul is difficult. The Fallout character is both a suave gun-slinging outlaw and a zombie-like creature. He’s also simultaneously good-looking, and he looks like a “melted candle” as the script described him. So, you can understand why non-gamer Ella Purnell – who plays Lucy in the show – didn’t fully understand what her co-star would look like simply by reading the scripts for the video game adaptation that has quickly become one of Amazon Prime’s best shows.
While chatting about how she prepped for Fallout, Purnell explained that during rehearsal she worked with Walton Goggins, but he wasn’t in full Ghoul mode yet. However, he was using his signature Southern drawl and making creative choices that helped his co-star get a sense of his character. Still, imagining an irradiated cowboy is not easy, and since the Lucy actress “would not consider [herself] a gamer,” though she did play the game for this show, she wasn’t sure what this character really looked like in live-action. She explained all of this to Interview Magazine, saying:
I remember being opposite Walton, who plays the ghoul for the first time, and I had no idea how this character was going to be. Just reading it on the script, that’s when you have to play the games to understand.
Ella Purnell has been open about the fact that she played Fallout for research. However, she’s by no means a video game expert, and we don’t know if she played the games before or after she read the scripts. So, understanding all the lore behind the beloved series of games was quite a challenge to take on.
However, between that and working with Goggins in rehearsal, she got a better sense of the Ghoul eventually. She spoke highly about working with the Justified actor, saying:
You can read about the ghoul, but you can’t really conceptualize this mutant irradiated cowboy. They described him in the script as his face looks like a melted candle, and my version of that is going to look completely different. … But reading opposite him and hearing the accent, and he does this thing with his teeth, it’s like a lisp, and it’s totally transformative.
She’s right, Goggins did totally transform for this role – in fact, he even “scared the shit out of” himself one time when he was in full Ghoul makeup.
As someone who watched Fallout without playing the game, Ghouls and the stories behind them were one of the topics I had the most questions about. They’re complex creatures, and if I were simply reading about them, and saw the description that they looked like a “melted candle,” my imagination probably also wouldn’t match their actual look.
Now, that the first chapter of the video game adaptation has ended, and Season 2 of Fallout is on its way, Ella Purnell will know exactly what to expect in terms of the Ghouls’ looks moving forward.
Lucy interacted with so many iterations of the humans-turned-creatures throughout the first set of episodes. Plus – and spoilers here – at the end of Fallout Season 1, she’s traveling with Goggins’ Ghoul to find her father. All this is to say, while Goggins’ look was incomprehensible just by reading the script, both Ella Prunell and the audience are used to (and looking forward to) seeing more of the irradiated outlaw.
To go back and see Fallout – the video game adaptation starring Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins that has taken the 2024 TV schedule by storm – you can stream Season 1 in full with an Amazon Prime subscription.