Actor Walton Goggins has shared new insight into his mental state for the newest season of Prime Video’s Fallout TV show, saying he felt completely wiped out after making The White Lotus and The Righteous Gemstones, and this actually helped his performance in Fallout.
This story contains spoilers for Fallout.
Speaking to Decider, Goggins said there is a moment in Episode 5, “The Wrangler,” when his character, Cooper Howard, has “nothing left” and has “no control over his environment and doesn’t understand what’s happening in the world in real time.” As it turned out, Goggins himself felt “the same way,” he said.
“We filmed that day the morning after the premiere of The White Lotus; I had about three hours of sleep. I just had nothing left in the tank; it was exactly where I needed to be for that day,” he said.
Goggins said the exhaustion he felt as a person improved his on-screen appearance in Fallout Season 2, and not just for the scene mentioned above, but for the entirety of Season 2.
“I was depleted after White Lotus, as anyone on that journey was. I had the good fortune of going straight to The Righteous Gemstones; it’s not easy being Baby Billy, and I left that just crawling across the finish line to arrive here,” he said. “And in some ways, I think it’s the best thing that could happen to me, because then I was just splayed open emotionally. That’s what was required of both Cooper Howard and The Ghoul this season.”
Also in the interview, Goggins said another parallel between his work and his real life came in Season 2 when his character is “deeply missing his child,” and so was he.
“It happened to be filmed, again, on a day that I felt such shame over being away from my child for so long,” he said. “Through this irradiated cowboy, I just got to let it all out in front of all these people, and I didn’t anticipate it and see it coming, and it made everybody really uncomfortable, and it made me uncomfortable, but it was cathartic.”
For more, check out GameSpot’s breakdown of Fallout Season 2, Episode 5. Three more episodes are on tap, culminating with the Season 2 finale on February 4. A third season is in the works.
