Walton Goggins Reveals How Much Playing Fallout’s Noseless Ghoul Affected His Signature Southern Drawl, And How He Overcame It
Hundreds of actors have lent their vocal talents to the globally popular Fallout video game franchise, but none were tasked with bringing their voices to life without a nose. Walton Goggins wasn’t so lucky when it came to the Fallout TV show, for which he’s portraying the long-living (and long-suffering) antagonist dubbed The Ghoul, whose visage is instantly recognizable due to the lack of a nose. As seen in the interview clip above, Goggins talked with CinemaBlend about how the character’s facial features created quite the challenge.
Within the world of the video games, ghouls are beings who've gone through massive amount of radiation poisoning following the apocalyptic events that send the world into disarray. And Walton Goggins' character is THE epitome of seemingly immortal threats, like a cross between a zombie's enternal march forward with the guile and confidence of a seasoned vampire. Not that the Righteous Gemstones star sounds like he comes from anywhere near Transylvania.
To the contrary, the Alabama native has long been known and praised for his southern drawl, put to use quote memorably as Justified's Boyd Crowder and The Hateful Eight's Sheriff Mannix. And when I asked if The Ghoul's headpiece made it harder for him to speak naturally, he was quick to confim that was the case. In his words:
I really did, man. I did daily. As soon as I put it on for the very first time, I went out by myself, and I had to just kind of work with it alone to see what was what was possible. Right? It's like taking a test drive in a fucking Lamborghini or something. And it's like all of these people - these well-paid, extremely artistic people - have designed this piece. Who is this person? That first session, you know, alone for an hour and a half, a couple hours by myself, going into the sun and in the shade. I started to kinda get a feel for it. But it really wasn't until the third time where I started to really get a feel for it.
After seeing the trailer for the first time, Walton Goggins amusingly reacted by thanking the lord that he has a nose, which can likely be tied to the issues he had getting used to how he could maneuver himself beneath The Ghoul's particular prosthetics. And it's not like he came at it like a half-assed amateur.
The actor took the time to see not just how the piece initially fit on his head and face, but also how it felt to move around in it in various settings. As many actors are only too aware, what works for someone inside an air-conditioned building does not always work when outside under a beating sun. The last thing you'd want is to think you're golden, only to have it all immediately slide away in a deluge of sweat.
Goggins continued, saying the process of personifying The Ghoul shifted from the nose-obstructing headpiece to the rest of the costume. In his words:
And then I thought, 'Okay, I got this guy.' I'm starting to get him in my body. And then we put the clothes on without the makeup on. 'Okay, that's not right. That's not right. Oooh.' With Amy Westcott and Jonah [Nolan]. 'This is right. This is the one. That's the jacket, That's the guy.' Then it all came together - I feel like I can do this, I got this. And the last piece were the dental things that I had to put inside my mouth, and it all went to shit, man. [Laughs.]
Turns out all the preventative efforts Walton Goggins made were temporarily for naught, as there were more unforeseen hurdles for him to traverse past. In this case, it involved dental applications that made saliva hard to come by. As he put it:
Like, I didn't even know how I could talk with these things in my mouth. And then all of a sudden, practically in the real world, I had a piece on my bottom lip, and a piece on my top lip, so I couldn't get any moisture in my mouth. I couldn't keep any moisture in my mouth. And it was like, you know, 106 with the heat index in New York at the time. So there were all of these things we had to kind of work around once we got it going. But we figured it out, you know? And I had a great time. I would do it again.
If it's not one thing, it's 17 others, amirite? For a lot of people, being in such an uncomfortable and unfamiliar situation like that could incite some costume-based claustrophobia, where the only instinct is "Get me out of this, and get this out of me!" But as it goes with most things, practice makes perfect, or in this case, "close to mildly comfortable," and Goggins didn't face any catastrophic trauma that would keep him away from reprising the role of The Ghoul in the future. Huzzah!
Check out Fallout’s trailer below, which only offers a slice of the bonkers storytelling on the way.
Fans are able to catch the post-apocalyptic fun even earlier than expected, with Prime Video shifting the premiere up to Wednesday, April 10, at 9:00 p.m. ET, pitting it up against broadcast primetime fare. And that’s nothing to turn one’s nose up at, assuming one has a nose. Check out everything else hitting the small screen soon with our 2024 TV schedule, and head to our rundown of upcoming video game adaptations to see what other digital universes are coming soon.
