Walton Goggins, in a gruesome starring role in Prime Video’s apocalyptic sci-fi series Fallout, said he knew he knew he was in for “an intense experience” having to transform every day on set into The Ghoul, a post-human character with melting flesh, a cowboy persona and some semblance of his humanity still left.
But at Saturday’s Deadline Contenders Television panel, the perennial character actor — beaming in from overseas, where he is shooting The White Lotus — said the task of transformation proved to be “extremely anxiety provoking” at first.
He had to figure out how to express himself under a thin layer of sweat-inducing facial prosthesis designed to make him look almost skeletal and how to be a walking, wisecracking horror show with a retainer in his mouth to simulate the absence of teeth. “When I put in the retainers, these things that kind of covered these pearly white teeth, I couldn’t speak.
I couldn’t get the words out,” Goggins said on the Fallout panel with co-stars Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten, showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner and production designer Howard Cummings. “I couldn’t get the words out.” But he and prosthetics designer Vincent Van Dyke developed a rhythm, Goggins said, and what began with five-hour ordeals for a trio of screen tests turned into two-hour turnarounds, and Goggins found his voice as the character in this well-received adaptation of the hit video game franchise. “So we got over all of that,” Goggins said.
Read more on deadline.com