While Fallout has broken out as one of the most popular shows of the year, and one of Prime Video’s most popular ever, Jake Garber very nearly turned the project down, when he was approached about working as its prosthetic department head.
This was, he recalls, because when first contacted by executive producer James W. Skotchdopole, the first words out of his mouth were “something about a ghoul.
Says Garber, “I had done enough of that stuff on Walking Dead for eight years that I was trying to cleanse the palate, not kind of repeat myself.”
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This was, thankfully, what Skotchdopole was hoping he would say, as the ghouls of Fallout would be something different altogether from the characters Garber had designed in the past. And thus, Garber decided to take the project on.
Based on the video game series from Bethesda Game Studios, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.
RELATED: ‘Fallout’: Jonathan Nolan In Conversation With Aaron Moten On Bringing The Video Game To Life
The crowning achievement of Garber’s work on the series would be the transformation of his frequent collaborator Walton Goggins into The Ghoul, a morally ambiguous bounty hunter who holds within him a 200-year history of the post-nuclear world. An irradiated, zombie-like mutant, The Ghoul is known for his decayed, ghastly appearance, characterized by leathery, decomposing skin and gaunt features, and has few remnants left to speak of, as far as the human being, movie star Cooper Howard, that he once was.
When Goggins was first shown illustrations of the character, he was equal parts excited and daunted by the journey he had ahead of him. While the sketches were “arresting visually,” he also “just wanted to take a nap” because he thought, “Oh man, this is going to be a lot.”
One major hope for the actor, with The Ghoul, was that he and his performance wouldn’t simply “disappear” beneath the layers of makeup, instead speaking powerfully to the “subtleties or nuances” of a complicated emotional journey.
“The thing that was most important for I think all of us was to not have the audience kind of repulsed by this experience, to not have them look away from the experience, but rather to lean into the roadmap of his face as almost a journey of a person who has been walking in an irradiated, post-apocalyptic kind of landscape for 200 years,” Goggins reflects in conversation with Garber in today’s episode of The Process, the final installment for the first Phase of the 2024 Emmys calendar. “So that’s what we were aiming for right out of the gate.”
While Vincent Van Dyke would oversee the initial stages of the creative in translating The Ghoul from the games to the small screen, providing the groundwork in design, it was Garber who would bring him to life on set by way of nine silicone pieces stretching from the top of Goggins’ head down to his torso.
The first application process took around five hours, but it was important for Garber to whittle it down, given his understanding of Goggins as an actor with “a lot of rabbit in his blood” who had a hard time sitting still. In the end, the makeup took around an hour and 45 minutes to apply and 25-30 to remove.
The most challenging piece of the prosthetic to work with, for Goggins, was the set of yellow veneers he’d have placed over his teeth. As the actor recalls, he “didn’t realize how that was going to affect my speech pattern. I mean, you have a mouth this big and this many teeth, it’s hard to get s’s out.”
While Goggins was also very nervous about the prospect of wearing custom contact lenses, he was grateful when key creatives decided to go in a different direction, keeping his own eyes in the picture as a representation of the sole remaining remnant of The Ghoul’s former self.
Debuting as one of Prime Video’s three most-watched titles, with the most-watched season globally since Season 1 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Fallout has already been renewed for a second season. Hailing from Kilter Films and executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the show is created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, who also exec produce and serve as co-showrunners.
For our full conversation between Garber and Goggins, who have collaborated on numerous high-profile projects since 2010’s Predators, click above.