Today, Amazon and Bethesda have debuted the first official trailer of the Fallout TV show, slated to air via Prime Video on April 11, one day earlier than originally planned. All of the eight episodes of the season will be available to be viewed right away. The first three episodes were directed by Jonathan Nolan, brother to the famous film director Christopher Nolan and also executive producer on the Fallout TV show alongside his wife Lisa Joy.
In a virtual press conference that Wccftech was able to attend yesterday, Bethesda’s Todd Howard (also an executive producer on the series) praised the work of Nolan’s Kilter Films production company and the whole cast.
People would approach us over I would say a 10-year period after Fallout 3 came out, from 2009 on, to adapt Fallout to film or television. We took a very cautious approach, and Jonah was somebody I was such a fan of the movies he did and the TV he was doing. I actually had someone reach out. When I first talked to Jonah, honestly, it was like someone I had known for a long time. He obviously played the games a ton, and his approach, right from the get-go, was in sync with what I was thinking. It’s been a great, great collaboration. For someone like me and the team here at Bethesda, it’s just a real blessing to see what they’ve done with it.
The trick with Fallout is it has so many different tones. It goes between the serious, the dramatic, and action, and some humor and nostalgic music and dramatic music. The trailer does what the show does really well, which is it weaves those different things together in a very unique blend that only Fallout can bring. They’ve done just an awesome job.
Nolan himself (who is credited for creating Westworld and Person of Interest, as well as writing blockbuster movies like The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar) is a big fan of the series, which certainly helped a lot. Here’s what he said in the press conference:
It started, for me, with Fallout 3, which devoured about a year of my life. I was an aspiring young writer at that point. It almost derailed my entire career. It’s so ludicrously playable and fun. No, I mean, seriously, the games were just incredible.
It’s such a rare thing and such an unbelievable thing, and I’ve gotten to do it twice in my career, to take something that you love and get a chance to play in that universe, to create your own version of that universe. The first go-round for me was Batman, and this time with Fallout, a game that I absolutely love, a series of games that I absolutely loved. About five years ago, Todd and I went and had lunch together. It was a bit of a fanning-out moment for me and we just started talking about the possibilities of how you could take this incredible universe.
I think one of the things that’s so powerful about the Fallout series is that every game is a little different. Different characters, a different setting, and a different look into this extraordinary universe.
Protagonist Ella Purnell (Kick-Ass 2, Army of the Dead, Yellowjackets) plays Vault dweller Lucy, who has an upbeat attitude that will be tested on the surface of the Fallout Wasteland. Talking about the character, she said:
What excited me about playing her was that she is so innocent and so naive and obviously very privileged as well. It was exciting for me to start in that place. She’s essentially a newborn baby. She hasn’t had any real life experiences. All she knows is what she was taught and what she’s read in books that she has in the Vault. It’s limited. And then you put her on the Wasteland, and what happens with that? That was really exciting for me to star in.
Purnell also praised Nolan’s penchant for working with practical effects and sets rather than using a lot of green screen, which made shooting the Fallout TV series ‘a lot of fun’.
It was so much fun working on this show. Every shoot is hard. Not every shoot is fun, and this one was just so fun for an actor. No two days were the same. Every prop, every costume, every location, every set was just bonkers. One of the joys of working with Jonah is he loves to do everything as much as he can for real, so you’re not working with that much green screen or, you know, dudes in green leotards. You get to really work with practicals and that means you don’t have to imagine so much. It’s real, and you can really do it, just like a kid in a candy store, honestly.
Actor Walton Goggins (The Shield, Justified, The Hateful Eight) also shared a message during the conference. He’ll play a Ghoul Bounty Hunter character in the Fallout TV series.
The Ghoul is, in some ways, the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. He’s the guide, if you will, through this irradiated hellscape that we find ourselves in in this post-apocalyptic world. He is a bounty hunter, an iconic bounty hunter. He is pragmatic, he is ruthless, he has his own set of moral codes, and he has a wicked sense of humor, much like me. No, he’s a very, very, very complicated guy, and to understand him, you have to understand the person that he was before the war. He had a name. His name was Cooper Howard, and he was a vastly different person than the ghoul that you’ve seen so far.
Over the course of the show, through his experience back in the world before the nuclear fallout, you will understand how the world was. He is the bridge between both these worlds. I hope you enjoy it.
April will be a great month for Fallout fans. In addition to the TV series airing on Prime Video, PC gamers can look forward to the release of the highly anticipated Fallout: London project, a total conversion mod for Fallout 4 featuring an entirely different story set in the capital of the United Kingdom. The mod will be released on St. George’s Day (April 23rd).
