Maybe I’ve been living in a subterranean bunker waiting for the radiation to go away but I somehow missed that the long-awaited Fallout TV adaptation was moving ahead. Earlier this year, both Walton Goggins (Justified) and Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets) were cast on the show and now Twin Peaks, Dune, and Blue Velvet legend Kyle MacLachlan is joining the cast too.
The news was broken by Variety, which reported that actors Xelia Mendes-Jones and Aaron Moten have also signed on. Mendes-Jones will next be seen in Netflix’s Havoc with Tom Hardy and season two of Amazon’s The Wheel of Time. Moten was recently in Father Stu with Mark Wahlberg as well as Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle.
There’s no word on who any of these actors will be playing on the show, which of course is based on the hugely popular Fallout video game franchise by Bethesda. In that series, the world has been decimated by nuclear war and the player emerges from safety to traverse that wasteland, which is filled with survivors, both dead and alive. Production on the show is scheduled to begin later this year with Westworld cohorts Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy executive producing along with co-showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.
This is purely speculative but the easy money would be on MacLachlan being some kind of villain, right? The head of a settlement or group who the show’s leads (likely played by Goggins and Purnell) must clash with. He just has that presence of someone very confident and very powerful—and in a world where bottlecaps are used as currency, someone confident and powerful is probably not heroic.
It’s going to be very interesting to see what Amazon and the teams behind this show do with what’s a seemingly infinite IP though. Video game adaptations, as we all know, don’t have a great track record. But with those franchises now getting full shows, like this and The Last of Us, instead of short movies, maybe the winds are turning.
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