“No, I haven’t sat down to play the games,” said Walton Goggins, who plays pre-war movie star Cooper Howard and his post-war counterpart The Ghoul. “And I won’t. I won’t. I won’t play the games. I’m not interested.”
The reason is actually pretty simple: Goggins doesn’t want to think of the world or the characters of Fallout as elements of a game.
“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.” he 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,” Goggins said.
Gonna copy paste what I said to another person: The beautiful thing about Fallout games is that there are no recurring major characters. Anyone can write a new character and the actors casted could just act. It’s a blank slate and they can do what they want. There is no pressure for the actors on how to act based on fan expectations.
I think the Fallout universe is about how people behave in a post-nuclear wasteland and the consequences of decisions and actions, rather than the story focusing on the characters’ internal psyche. The overall story is more about examination of humanity’s proclivity towards self-destruction and darker urges. Now that I think about it, we talk about events and factions more in Fallout than its characters. The TV series took a different approach and has more focus on the characters and their motivations. But the characters in the TV are new so they are not under scrutiny from fans who would say “oh they didn’t protray such and such correctly.”