'Fallout' Season 2: Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten and Walton Goggins Decode The Show's Apocalypse

The thing about stories of apocalypse, ironically, is that they are inherently infused with hope. For what it’s worth, 2025 may just have been the vision of a wasteland for someone in the 1800s, much like how Amazon Prime Video’s wildly successful show Fallout imagines a post-nuke world two centuries later. But what propels it like in the real world, is resolution and ultimately...hope.

Based on the eponymous hit video game, season one of Fallout season (2024) clocked in over a 100 million views and then was unsurprisingly renewed for a second outing that is premiering in December 2025.

Set in the badlands of what once used to be the United States of America, Fallout is a retro futuristic drama where the survivors of the nuclear bombing that wiped out the planet two centuries ago were cooped up in underground Vaults. Over the years and decades, they are then forced to wriggle out of their bunkers to encounter a barbaric new dog-eat-dog world that’s fuelled by violence, greed and dark humour. The series follows Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), one of the more privileged and idealistic Vault dwellers; Maximus (Aaron Moten), a morally fraught soldier of the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel; and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a dubious bounty hunter defaced by radiation. In the wilderness, their paths cross to reveal the human and moral cost of survival, exposing cracks in the social order that literally — and metaphorically — leads to a dustbowl of nothingness.

In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India, Purnell, Moten and Goggins explore the emotional landscape occupied by their characters as the unlikely saviours and custodians of a species that has annihilated its own.

Edited excerpts from the conversation:

THR India: The show's journey is not just about survival, it's also about identity and who you turn out to be in the face of a catastrophe. What part of your character's identity do you think you could not carry forward from season one into season two?

Aaron Moten: There's this weird thing that I always had a conversation about with our brilliant writers Graham (Wagner), Geneva (Robertson-Dworet) and Jonathan Nolan — it's about how there's not that many rites of passage for young men these days. Through history, we used to join the military or go to war or have a child or, you know, there's usually something, but for a lot of young men today, that rite of passage is a real difficult thing to identify.

It’s a “When am I a man?” type of thing. It is a question we were asking with Maximus in our first season. And because of this chance encounter (with Lucy and the Ghoul) and the circumstances of the first season, we're moving and developing the character in a way where he's having to push past knowing whether he's ready and knowing that he has to make choices. He's done being used by other people.

Ella Purnell: That's good. I was really taken by that one. I think for me, her sense of wholeness and sense of innocence and optimism is the thing that makes Lucy who she is. It's her defining core pillar. You know, but how do you maintain that after discovering what she discovers at the end of season one ? It's so painful for me to actually think about what she went through at the end of season one, learning who her father really is and what he's done (he is responsible for the nuclear bombing).

If she is that wrong about him, and everything she thought she knew and everything she thought she was, then every fibre of her being is completely disintegrating in front of her. That pillar that she built her entire life upon is gone — it's crumbling and she's faced with choices.

Who is she going to turn into? Is it this ghoul and this murderer in the wayside? Is she going to rebel? Is she going to go back to the vault, and go home? I think that was something that I spoke to Geneva and Graham about — is how much optimism does she really have left at this point? And how much of it is just fronting?

Walton Goggins: I think it's a very good question. For me, it was about seeing another person as a human being. Where we leave off in season one or during season one, the Ghoul never saw Lucy as a human. He wasn't torturing her, in my mind, he was just using her as bait, if you will.

Then we get to the end of season one, and he invites her on this journey because he sees what she needs. He has a very specific reason for doing it. But over the course of season two and this walk that we had, I just really tried to imagine, well, how would that really go? Who would speak first? Chances are it was definitely going to be Lucy.

When does the Ghoul answer a question and when does he answer it with more than a “huh”? But the thing that I kept coming back to is when does he ask her a question about herself? When does he instigate a conversation? That's a very human trait. And I think that his journey in season two, while he is resisting the whole way, is to become more human. And that's incremental, and it happens against his will.

THR India: You have said that you had to understand Cooper Howard (the Ghoul) better to be able to play the Ghoul more convincingly. What change in your character's arc in this season actually helps you play two parts of the same person better? Because right now Cooper is more than just a tragic backstory.

WG: Well, that's also a very good question. You get to spend a lot more time with Cooper Howard this season than you did in season one. And what I didn't anticipate until I watched the first five episodes of the show this year, is that everything that Cooper is going through, the Ghoul doesn't need to say anything. Whenever you cut back to him, you understand him in a way that you couldn't have otherwise. And Cooper's journey is one of really grappling with the fact that his wife may be the principal architect of the ending of the world.

And moreover, really understanding that he doesn't understand anything. And it happened, the rug was pulled out from underneath him in a moment. And in some ways it reflects how I feel about the world that we live in, or how I think a lot of us feel. A lot of us feel out of control. And that's what he's experiencing.

THR India: To all three of you, what's the most questionable decision your character makes in this entire journey so far, which confirms the fact that maybe humanity deserves the apocalypse?

EP: A decision she makes in episode four. Largely swayed by this one (points at Goggins). And we see a new side of Lucy we didn't see before.

WG: I'm not at liberty to talk about it, but something happens in episode 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It fundamentally changed him.

EP: Not one, though. Not episode one. (Laughs)

WG: No, not one.

AM: I have no idea (of what’s to come).