Fallout fans are raving over Walton Goggin’s Instagram post, which teased him getting comfortable under The Ghoul’s skin. The photo also confirmed it won’t be long before Season 2 premieres. “Back in the saddle… #Deux. Gatdamn it feels good to slip on this skin. I do this shit for the love of the Game,” Goggins wrote. He previously lamented the hours he spent on the makeup chair for the transformation, which involved nine pieces of thin silicone layered on his face, followed by finishing touches that fleshed out The Ghoul’s irradiated, subhuman skin. The makeup team spent nine months perfecting the process, which reduced Goggin’s five-hour ordeal to one hour and 45 minutes.
Goggins preferred his complex prosthetics to a full-face mask, which would have impeded his acting. “[The] designed pieces that were very thin, but very durable so that it would still be me underneath there and I could still experience my own facial reactions and they would be able to pick all of that up,” he told Men’s Journal in April. He watched old Westerns during the makeup sessions to get in character. “I couldn’t close my eyes. I had to sit in one place the whole time,” he added. “[Prosthetic designer Vincent Van Dyk] got so good at it that I said, ‘Man, you need to take a little more time’ because some of these movies we were watching were like two and a half hours long.”
Walton Goggins Didn’t Want To Be Buried In The Ghoul’s Prosthetics
The Ghoul’s face is all practical except for the broken (missing) nose, which was fixed in post-production with digital effects. Goggins’ look is jarring in the completed work, but he made sure fans still see him emote beneath the prosthetics. “[I] asked [producer Jonathan Nolan] after the first couple of takes, ‘What are you reading? What are you seeing?’ He said, ‘We’re seeing it all, everything that you’re doing’ and a big part of that was because I had my eyes,” he explained. “At one point, we toyed with putting contacts in and then all of a sudden, it became a very different experience for everyone in the room, so we quickly took them out.”
Fallout Season 1 is streaming on Prime Video.