While many people plan to walk into a new job well prepared, few are as ready for action as Walton Goggins. fall outIn a new interview, the actor talks about how he crafted his Emmy-nominated performance, and how the show’s timeline takes us back to the 1950s film Western …
“I think it’s a great opportunity to be a part of the franchise,” Goggins, a veteran actor who has played memorable characters on TV for years, told Vulture. (Justified, Deadwood, The Righteous Gemstones, The Shield, Invincible) And in the movies too (Predators, The Hateful Eight, Ant-Man and the Wasp)— we got a glimpse into his acting process, and to say it was thorough and meticulous would be an understatement.
“[I] “In preparing for this movie, I watched a lot of the movies I’d seen before. I wasn’t looking for a ghoul, I was looking for Cooper Howard. Cooper was a Western star in the 1950s, so I really wanted to find out what his contemporaries were like — what jobs they lost, what jobs they gained, etc.,” Goggins told Vulture.
He thought about Howard’s path to becoming a Hollywood star – to Goggins, he was someone who was charismatic, good at riding a horse, and just got into show business – and he studied Henry Fonda in particular. Once Upon a Time in the West Paul Newman Butch Cassidy and the Sundance KidHe also fall out He says he learned this from his former co-star Anthony Hopkins, and that reading the script 250 times helps him absorb the material intuitively. “You really have to put your ego aside.”
To get a concrete sense of the ghoul’s state of mind, Goggins focused on the mental transformation Howard went through over the years in a post-apocalyptic world. “Whenever I say on paper, Oh, he’s lived for 200 years.“That’s hard to understand,” Goggins said.
He continued, “I don’t think about it in those terms. Let’s dissect those 200 years. What was it really like? Day 1: What happened right after the bombs fell? Did he wake up five days later? Did he wake up immediately? … And then I thought, what was it like the first time someone tried to kill him for food, water, resources? Right? What was it like the first day he had to kill someone for those very things? And the collapse of true morality, what is your true north? And the collapse of everything he knew. He went from being a moral being to being amoral.”
fall out Season 1 is currently streaming on Prime Video, and Ghoul’s journey continues in Season 2.
Want more news from io9? Check out everything you need to know about when the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases are due, what’s next for the DC Universe in movies and TV, and the future of Doctor Who.