An iconic post-apocalypse RPG video game is now a big-budget series with Fallout – streaming from April 11, only on Prime Video. Before you step out of the vault and into this post-nuclear landscape, let Eliza Janssen prep you with a collection of things to know about the series.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we feel…pretty fine, actually, seeing the exciting new trailers and promo pics for Prime Video’s adaptation of beloved Bethesda game series Fallout. Since 1997, four official Fallout role-playing games and several spin-offs have plunged us into a post-nuclear atompunk landscape, making the apocalypse seem like a total blast.
The rich, rusted setting of the games has been crying out for an adaptation, and we’ve collected together everything you need to know about this upcoming first season; from the starry cast to how the show’s eight episodes fit into the game’s lore. Scroll for an instant Karma boost.
1. Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy say they’re not trying to please fans of the game
Nolan and Joy are best known for their work on Westworld, another dystopian sci-fi series; a husband and wife producing team, they’re uniquely well-placed to breathe life into the hugely popular Fallout franchise. Nolan, whose big bro Christopher just won an armful of Oscars for Oppenheimer (nuclear holocaust: so hot right now), says Fallout 3 “devoured about a year of [his] life” when it was released, calling the 2008 Game of the Year winner “ludicrously playable and fun”.
Even though the team are fans themselves, however, they’re not going to kowtow to the demands of angry super-nerds, saying at a press event that it’s impossible to “please the fans of anything”. Nolan continued: “I think you have to come into this trying to make the show that you want to make and trusting that, as fans of the game, we would find the pieces that were essential to us… and try to do the best version.” So keep your angry Tweets and subreddit rants to yourself: the team doesn’t wanna hear it.
2. The series takes place after the games’ timeline, in LA’s “Vault 33”
The timeline of the Fallout game series is a tad brain-scrambling, so here’s a (very) streamlined version: in a retro-futuristic 2077 of hover cars and 1950s-nostalgia, a nuclear war breaks out across our planet. 219 years later, society is split into those who’ve sheltered in protective Vaults, those who find purpose in secretive Enclaves, cannibal cults, and Brotherhoods, and the radiation-burned Ghouls who’ve been left to die on the earth’s surface.
With snippets of the Fallout trailer showing that we’re kicking off in Vault 33, we now know that our characters will be duking it out in the savage, unforgiving Wasteland that was once Los Angeles. (Fallout 3 and 4 both took place on the US East Coast, so a journey West is a nice change.) Nolan told Vanity Fair that this timeline means the series is “almost like Fallout 5…I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but it’s just a non-interactive version of it, right?”
3. Ella Purnell is our protagonist Lucy, a young Vault Dweller
With her huge, anime eyes and youthful demeanour, Purnell is a perfect character through which we can recoil at the horrors of Fallout‘s devastated world. You might know her from the first season of Yellowjackets, and here she’s playing a similarly sheltered character, unprepared for the dangers that lie beyond the walls of her Vault home.
In our first clip of the upcoming show, seen below, we witness Purnell’s Lucy trying to de-escalate a risky situation. It’s not particularly effective…until Aaron Moten’s Brotherhood of Steel knight Maximus shows up to save the day. Inspired by Arthurian tradition, Maximus is kind of a techno-monk—and his vastly different experience of post-apocalyptic life makes him a fascinating foil to Lucy’s naivety. Who’s that noseless third party in the Mexican standoff? So glad you asked…
Watch the first clip from the live-action #Fallout series premiering April 11 on Prime Video. pic.twitter.com/yLWLM0wplg
— Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) March 19, 2024
4. Walton Goggins goes noseless as mutant bounty hunter The Ghoul
He may be a tad hard to recognise, underneath that absent schnoz and layers of ravaged skin. But that’s toothy charmer Walton Goggins as mutated gunslinger The Ghoul, a former family man whose life (and pretty face) got destroyed back when those pesky bombs dropped. Dude is more-or-less immortal, and has seen things that would curl the hairs on Lucy and Maximus’s innocent heads. We’re sure that Goggins, with his tragi-comic turns in western roles such as The Hateful Eight and Justified, will bring both menace and surprising empathy to this antagonistic character.
5. Kyle MacLachlan plays Lucy’s father, a Vault Overseer
Talk about a nuclear family. Once upon a time, MacLachlan was the virtuous detective Dale Cooper of Twin Peaks fame, and now he’s been promoted to mayor of Fallout‘s Vault setting. We’re expecting his character Overseer Hank to bring an avuncular, parental energy to Lucy’s early scenes, as she steps out of the (relative) comfort of her fallout bunker and ventures into the terrifying world beyond. We also hope he’s not just around for some early establishing scenes of the series—can’t get enough of that big, square, All-American jaw…
6. Other familiar faces include Sarita Choudhury and Michael Emerson
Following the twisted comedic sensibility of the video games, the Fallout series has packed its supporting cast with funny people such as What We Do in the Shadows star Matt Berry, who voices helper-bot Mr Handy; Dale Dickey, best in the biz at playing rough-as-guts, down-on-their-luck women; and ex-SNL castmate Chris Parnell, cast as a bureaucratic cyclops Overseer. And Just Like That star Sarita Choudhury will appear as a badass wasteland leader, perhaps serving as a foil to MacLachlan’s sheltered community protector. Michael Emerson, who’s worked with Nolan before on crime series Person of Interest, will be back in brainiac mode here as enigmatic scientist Wilzig.
7. Fallout’s showrunners have experience on Captain Marvel and The Office
Nolan, Joy, and Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard—a head developer of the Fallout franchise—are executive producers of this hotly-anticipated new series, but Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner are credited as creators and showrunners. She’s responsible for Captain Marvel‘s first stand-alone film; he’s a gun at TV comedy, with credits on Portlandia, The Office, and Silicon Valley. A weird blend, but the kind of weird that will work wonders for this offbeat sci-fi adaptation.
8. The show will explain the origins of the games’ smiley Vault Boy icon
Who’s got one thumb up and seems pretty stoked to be spending the apocalypse in a suffocating vaulted society? This guy! An ironic symbol of Fallout‘s post-apocalyptic black comedy, Vault Boy doesn’t just appear in the new series: he gets his own damn origin story, which Bethesda creator Todd Howard was stoked to see. “That was something that they came up with that’s just really smart”, he told Vanity Fair, praising the TV show’s creative team for fleshing out a character we didn’t even know existed beyond being a sick lil decal.
9. Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi is behind the series’ score
To listen to the Fallout soundtrack is to trip back through 20th century, as each game makes use of eerie, evocative tunes from the 1920s up until the 2000s. Composers Mark Morgan, Inon Zur, and Devin Townshend have also contributed diverse original compositions to each game, ranging from ambient tracks to lush orchestral soundscapes. With all this in mind, the Iranian-German talent behind that iconic GoT theme song has plenty of inspiration to draw from, in composing an all-new sound to suit the Prime Video series.
10. Filming took place in New Jersey, New York, Utah…and Namibia’s aptly-named Skeleton Coast
From July of 2022, a secret project going by the name “Hondo” began filming in three different US states. Despite borrowing the title of a 1950s John Wayne film, it was pretty plain to see that the mysterious show was in fact the Fallout TV adaptation. Production then levelled-up by using Namibia’s remote coast as a post-apocalyptic LA wasteland, with Nolan telling IGN that the vast, bleak landscapes “required almost no visual effect enhancements…it’s impossible not to feel a little bit carried away.” You’ve gotta feel a twinge of disappointment when a Hollywood production comes to shoot some grimy, dystopian sci-fi story in your hometown and barely makes any changes to its production design…
11. It won’t be a depressing end-times bummer like The Last of Us
Now don’t get us wrong: we loved that other post-apocalyptic show, based on a sci-fi survival video game franchise. But The Last of Us could be intensely heavy and sorrowful at times, in a way that the upcoming Fallout show seems to entirely avoid. “I think you also have a moment that we’re in right now in which the world, you know, it seems to be ever more frightening and dour,” Nolan pointed out at a press conference on March 6. “There’s a thread of optimism woven into the show.”
This is a series of video games, after all, which features a doomsday bunker full of clones of people named Gary, who can only utter the word “Gary”. We hope the tone is kept quirky, unpredictable, and a few degrees less soul-destroying than The Last of Us.
12. Your next Halloween costume may be sorted
The world of the Fallout games is so colourful and distinct: catnip for cosplayers. Now that the Prime Video series is set to be huge, we reckon you’ll see plenty of blue Vault suits out and about at costume parties, and perhaps even some irradiated-lookin’ prosthetics from true fanboys.
I don’t own a vault suit… should I get a vault suit? 🤔🤔🤔
#fallout pic.twitter.com/RGJRz94dYx— April Nicole Hill (@AprilNicoleHill) April 3, 2024
The neat thing is that everybody has busted old clothes in their closet that can easily be scorched-up to go Ghoul Mode, and any blue boiler suit can be embroidered to mimic Lucy’s trademark lewk. We’re already kinda living in a Wasteland: might as well make it a fun, fashiony one?
