There's been a lot of intrigue surrounding Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's upcoming Prime Video adaptation of Fallout, and we finally have a first look and details courtesy of Vanity Fair.
Just like in the games, a nuclear war breaks out across Earth in the year 2077 before the story jumps forward by 219 years to the post-apocalyptic wasteland - inspired by 1940s America - which remains. Ella Purnell plays Lucy, a character who leaves her subterranean vault and ventures out into a world fans of the Fallout series have already spent hundreds of hours in.
However, that doesn't mean there won't be anything new to explore.
Todd Howard, the director of 2008's Fallout 3 and 2015's Fallout 4 and an executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, reveals that the Fallout TV series will finally explore Vault Boy's origin; this story will also fit into the franchise's wider mythology.
"We view what’s happening in the show as canon," he explains. "That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion. I sort of looked at it like, 'Ah, why didn’t we do that?'"
As Lucy continues to explore this world, she meets wannabe soldier Maximus (Aaron Moten), part of a group of brutal warriors known as the Brotherhood of Steel.
Kyle MacLachlan, meanwhile, stars as Lucy's father, the "overseer" of Vault 33, Moisés Arias plays her brother, and Lost alum Michael Emerson is a researcher named Wilzig. However, the biggest surprise is that Walton Goggins is set to play a bounty hunter known as The Ghoul!
We'd expected him to be the show's lead protagonist. Instead, "The Ghoul is a gruesomely scarred roughrider who has a code of honor, but also a ruthless streak...the show occasionally flashes back to the human being he once was, a father and husband named Cooper Howard, before the nuclear holocaust turned the world into a cinder and transformed him into an undead, noseless sharp-shooting fiend."
In the Fallout games, it's typical for the Ghouls to be little more than mindless cannon fodder, so this is an intriguing twist. Nolan says, "Walton’s equally adept at drama and comedy, which is so difficult. There is a chasm in time and distance between who this guy was and who he’s become, which for me creates an enormous dramatic question: What happened to this guy? So we’ll walk backwards into that."
Prime Video has also shared some stills from the show which you can check out below. Fallout is set to premiere on April 12, 2024.