Walton Goggins has time to play sexy DILFs on Saturday Night Live and the Grinch in Walmart’s Black Friday ad, but not sit down and mess around with VATs in one of the games his hit Fallout TV show is based on. Not only has Goggins never played a Fallout game in the past. He doesn’t plan to do so in the future either. I don’t blame him, either. It’s just really funny how emphatic he is about it.
“No, I haven’t sat down to play the games,” he told PC Gamer ahead of season 2’s release later this month. “And I won’t. I won’t. I won’t play the games. I’m not interested.”
He sounds pretty sure.
Goggins plays the pre-nuclear holocaust movie star Cooper Howard turned post-apocalyptic Ghoul. Those mutated humans play a huge role in the lore of the Fallout universe. An update to Fallout 76 earlier this year made Ghouls playable in the ongoing survival MMO. An update earlier this week even added Goggins’ Ghoul as a new character voiced by the Righteous Gemstones co-star himself.
The actor says he has a good reason for not trudging through hundreds of hours of open-world RPG malarkey. He doesn’t want it to spoil his interpretation of the character and the world he inhabits.
“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. I believe that Cooper Howard exists in the world.” Goggins said. “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.”
Notably, The Ghoul was completely made up for Amazon’s adaptation of Fallout, so it’s not like, say, playing Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings without ever having read J.R.R. Tolkien.
As Hollywood keeps mining gaming for new blockbusters, actors, writers, and directors keep getting asked if they’ve played the source material. Some have. Brie Larson, who plays Rosalina in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, is a known Mario fan and Alex Garland played plenty of FromSoftware games before pitching his version of an Elden Ring movie. Others aren’t racing to pick up a controller.
God of War showrunner Ronald D. Moore said he gave up trying to play the 2018 PlayStation exclusive because it was just too hard. Justin Lin, set to direct the Helldivers 2 adaptation, hasn’t played it either. One fan asked Arrowhead Game Studios on Discord to make sure the Fast and Furious director eventually does, or at least watches some videos about it on YouTube.
CEO Shams Jorjani said no way: “I trust Justin,” he wrote. “He did a great job on the Star Trek movie.”
