Despite starring in Amazon’s Fallout adaptation, Walton Goggins said he had zero motivation to pick up a controller and try one of the games that inspired the show. His position on the subject was firm: he never played Fallout before filming, and he insisted he wouldn’t start now.
Before season 2’s arrival later this month, Goggins told PC Gamer his stance as bluntly as possible. “No, I haven’t sat down to play the games. And I won’t. I won’t. I won’t play the games. I’m not interested.”
The reasoning behind Goggins’s decision
In Fallout, Goggins plays Cooper Howard, a pre-war movie star turned irradiated Ghoul. While Ghouls already stood as a major part of the franchise’s lore, his specific character didn’t exist in the games until recently.
Earlier this year, Fallout 76 made Ghouls playable, and a fresh update released this week even added a Ghoul modeled after Goggins, complete with his own voiceover work.
Goggins had a very good reason for not playing the Fallout games. He felt it would negatively impact the perception he’s built up about the world his character is living in.
“All of a sudden, I’m looking at this world from a very different perspective, and as something on a screen in which I am an avatar in. I don’t believe that I’m an avatar. I believe The Ghoul exists in the world,” Goggins said, adding, “I believe that Cooper Howard exists in the world.”
“The best way that I can serve this world and serve the fans of this game, I think, is to go to work every single day and believe the circumstances that I’m presented with.”
Other adaptation projects had similar responses
TV show and movie adaptations of beloved video games and novels are becoming much more prevalent these days. Adaptations naturally come with highs and lows. Some projects wander so far from the source that longtime fans lose patience, while others face the opposite problem. Viewers doubt they’ll ever measure up, even when the people making them care deeply. For example, movies such as Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, Monster Hunter, and Rampage didn’t live up to their source material.
On the flip side, Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog stayed true to their original material. Most recently, fans of Heated Rivalry praised Crave’s ongoing adaptation for staying remarkably close to Rachel Reid’s novel, with many noting that the cast clearly understood their characters from the page to the screen.
There are also instances of showrunners asking their actors not to play the games their shows are based on. One famous example is The Last of Us, where co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann specifically told their actors not to play the game. Their reasoning?
“With our actors, what we told them — and they often would not listen to us — we asked them, ‘Don’t play the game,’” Druckmann told IndieWire. “Because the games have performances that are brilliant as far as I’m concerned.”
They didn’t want the actors to copy the voice actors’ performances, but to make the characters their own instead.
Even so, viewers reacted to Goggins with amusement. One user on X summed it up best. “Walton Goggins refusing to play Fallout is the chaotic energy I aspire to. Mood. 💀”
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