Walton Goggins says he is freaked out by ‘Fallout’ Season 2’s proximity to real life political events: “The symmetry is unnerving and really unsettling”
Fallout Season 2 may have hit the nail on the head and it was mostly unintentional. So much so that even Walton Goggins himself cannot believe how on the nose it feels.
Spoiler alert: In the Season 2 finale, it’s revealed that the U.S. government — not Robert House (Justin Theroux) and Valut-Tec as previously believed — is really behind the dropping of the bombs that brought about the nuclear apocalypse. That revelation, paired with themes of anti-protestation, corporate greed on a deadly scale, and dangerous technological advances, is hitting some fans a little hard.
Goggins, who plays Cooper Howard/The Ghoul in the hit Prime Video series, says that while Season 2’s storylines greatly reflect the current political climate in the United States, it may be an example of life imitating art and vice versa.
“We’re not a political show, we don’t stand on a soapbox until [you understand] ‘this is how you [should] think.’ This show’s always been [symbolic] because it’s based on the game about the privileged vault dwellers and the people that were left to die on the surface,” he told DECIDER. “It was bound to speak about the current events without that being the intention. Yeah, the symmetry is unnerving and really unsettling.”
It’s something that Goggins, who has been outspoken on politics in the past, including most recently amid the protests against I.C.E. in Minnesota and around the country, knows all too well. He says that in filming Cooper’s flashback scenes throughout Season 2, navigating the tinderbox of Vault-Tec’s trigger finger and House’s willingness to plunge the world into chaos.
“This experience that I went through as Cooper Howard, in this conversation with Robert House, Justin Theroux, one of my dear friends, and walking into that room thinking that I understood what my life was and what life is, that I was in control of with a certain amount of autonomy, pulling levers that dictated my experience on this planet, to realize that I don’t know anything,” he explained of his character’s Episode 5 breakdown.
In reality, Goggins’ Fallout character has to accept a hard truth about things that he can and cannot control, albeit after pounding back a few drinks and going for a ride on an atomic bomb, a la a mechanical horse. It’s an apt metaphor, he says, for how many people are feeling.
“People have been pulling those levers for a very long time. Subsequently, he walks out of the room and gets extremely inebriated and rides a f**king atomic bomb in front of a group of people,” Goggins explained of Cooper’s spiral in the middle of Season 2. “I think a lot of us feel that way right now. The world we thought we knew isn’t the world that we’re actually living in.”
Luckily for The White Lotus Season 3 alum, it only takes 200 years for things to turn around for his character, as Season 2’s finale sees him finally receiving confirmation that his wife and daughter are out there. There is light at the end of this dark, dark tunnel.
The best we can hope for is that it won’t take nearly that long to get Season 3.
All episodes of Fallout Season 2 are now streaming on Prime Video.
