Prime Video’s new epic sci-fi show has a huge connection to one of 2023’s biggest movies

Stephen Porzio

“What are the odds and the timing of both of them?” – one of the series’ stars told JOE.

Fallout – Prime Video’s big-budget series adaptation of the popular post-apocalyptic sci-fi video game franchise – premieres this week on the streaming service after much anticipation.

Executively produced by and directed in part by Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Westworld), the show is described as the “story of haves and have-nots” in a post-nuclear war world in which there is almost nothing left to have.

“200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters (including series star Ella Purnell) are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind—and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them,” the plot synopsis reads.

The nuclear element of Fallout is particularly interesting given Jonathan Nolan’s involvement, as the writer-director is also the brother of filmmaker Christopher Nolan – who won the Oscar Best Picture prize this year for his movie Oppenheimer – which details the creation of the first atomic bombs.

When JOE had the pleasure of speaking to Fallout’s cast members Kyle MacLachlan and Walton Goggins, we asked them if they had thought about the show as being a “thematic follow-up” to Oppenheimer.

In response, Goggins said: “I don’t think the irony is lost on any of us that participated in this – what are the odds of one brother making a movie or telling a story about the building of the atomic bomb and then the other brother dropping that atomic bomb?

“Yeah, we’ve had that conversation many times over the course of making this – what are the odds and the timing of both of them?”

Goggins – who plays a mutated gunslinging bounty hunter in Fallout – also spoke to JOE about the timeliness of the show’s story of nuclear destruction.

“It’s something that, us that are a little older, we grew up with. We did all of those drills in high school and in middle school,” he said.

“Unfortunately, we thought we had left that time behind us. It was like a distant memory. But it is also a part of the world in which we live in today.

“Jonah [Jonathan] has said this before but when this show was starting to be written, it was in 2019 and it did feel like a distant memory and over the last three or four years, this show feels more and more relevant, almost too relevant. It’s back in the conversation.”

Fallout’s eight-episode first season will premiere on Prime Video in Ireland and the UK on 11 April.

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