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Over the years, live-action videogame adaptations have been a notoriously difficult nut for Hollywood studios to crack. Between movies that have taken excessive liberties with the source material, or television series that fail to adequately translate the interactive, and non-linear structure of the original games, many avid gamers have grown increasingly weary of announcements proclaiming that their favourite IP was the next in line to be given the Hollywood treatment.
However, more recent years would seem to indicate the key to a successful live-action adaption had finally been found. With the overwhelming critical and popular responses to shows like The Last of Us and Twisted Metal, Hollywood has finally begun to bring some of the world’s most beloved games to life in ways being openly embraced by new and established fans alike.
Now Prime Video are the next in line to unveil their own spin on a much beloved gaming franchise, none other than Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic Fallout franchise. And, thankfully, this latest live-action adaptation also looks set to blow even the most avid gamers away with their witty and detailed take on the irradiated, post-apocalyptic world.
Ahead of Fallout’s streaming debut on April 11, we attended a round table interview with series co-creator Jonathan Nolan and the show’s leads Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets, Army of the Dead) and Aaron Moten (Emancipation, Father Stu).
“One of the reasons I love these games is because they’re open world role-playing games,” Nolan explains. “You get to decide where you want to steer the story, which means a sort of a rigorous adaptation is impossible.”
However, as a seasoned screenwriter whose credits include co-writing the Christian Bale-led Dark Knight trilogy with his brother Christopher Nolan, the younger Nolan sibling was well armed to tackle this unique challenge.
“There is no one version of any of these games,” he elaborates, “and there are seven games, so it puts it more in the space of the Batman universe, which I lived in for about 10 years, where you’ve had all of these brilliant writers and artists who’ve brought these games to life, the question becomes [finding] where the commonality is.
“The thing that was common to all these games that I was most struck by, and the reason we wanted to do the adaptation, was the tone… the tone is so unique and so odd. It’s dark, it’s violent. It’s satirical, funny, goofy, gonzo.”
And there are perhaps no better words to describe the new Fallout show than ‘violent’, ‘funny’, ‘goofy’ and ‘gonzo’. Whether it be Moten’s Brotherhood of Steel squire lugging a hilariously large equipment bag as a nod to the game characters’ ability to “carry around an almost comical amount” of stuff, to Purnell’s earnest vault dwelling Lucy navigating the difficulties inherent in expanding the limited gene pool of her underground community, the laughs come almost as quickly as the rounds from a Rockwell CZ53 personal minigun.
“What I loved about it was she’s like a Disney Princess,” Purnell says of her character, a sheltered young woman who suddenly finds herself thrust in the Wasteland after a lifetime spent in the kitsch, ‘50s inspired world of a Vault-Tec vault. “And that was sort of the closest reference I had to, you know, imagining Ned Flanders in the apocalypse, which was sort of one of my other reference points.”
“I love how she starts so innocent,” she elaborates. “So naive. You know, obviously inherently privileged. Inherently, pardon the pun, sheltered, and… when she goes up to the Wasteland she sees the people aren’t all like her. People aren’t all good. People aren’t all privileged the way that she is. People have suffered. There’s real hardship and trauma and suffering on the surface, which is something she’s never experienced.”
However, true to the open nature of the original games, the Fallout show is also told from the perspective of two other strikingly different characters. Representing varying levels of gaming experience, Purnell’s Lucy is in many ways the new player, naïve to the ways of the game and its intricacies.
Meanwhile, Moten’s Maximus, the ambitious Brotherhood of Steel squire who dreams of little else than attaining his own T-60 Power Armour, is the slightly more experienced player keen to prove their worth and get the best gear. Something, it would seem Moten has in common with his character. When asked if he kept any mementos from set, his mind instantly turned to the practical T-60 armour used during filming.
“If I liberated something,” Moten jokes, “that would be my T-60 armour. I hope to do memeable things with it and that’ll be the way [Jonathan] knows that I took it. Somebody in a T-60 on a children’s playground trying to push kids on the swing, something like that, no?”
Finally, the gunslinging Ghoul (played by Ant-Man and the Wasp’s Walton Goggins) is the veteran player, the one who has been grinding away online for hundreds of hours and has no concern for questions of morality or interest in lasting allegiances.
Yet in such a detailed, and often bizarre world filled some truly unusual, irradiated creatures and intricate gadgets, the utmost care was put into making the show as practical and as close to the games as possible.
“Because the story is original,” Nolan explains. “Because the characters are original, we really wanted to have a high level of fidelity to the costumes and the props. We looked at all the games, but we looked at Fallout 4 probably more than any of the other games in terms of that and Fallout 76 a little bit in terms of the specific design elements. We love the T-60, we love that suit.”
“I have to shout out Howard [Cummings] and his and his entire team, actually.” Purnell says of the show’s exceptional production design. “Who did such an incredible job building the sets. The Vault, the Vault suits. Filly, the town, I mean every set you could get lost in for hours. Every detail you know, you gotta pick any book out of the bookcase and open it. And it would be full. The attention to detail is just phenomenal.”
Gather your Nuka Cola bottlecaps and get ready to explore the Wasteland when Fallout debuts exclusively on Prime Video, with all episodes available now!