This story comprises spoilers for the fifth episode of “Fallout” Season 2.
On a sunny afternoon in late February 2025, members of the “Fallout” crew are establishing a suspended rig alongside a dusty highway on their Santa Clarita set that will probably be used to movie a scene the place Walton Goggins’ character — a long-lived mutated survivor of the nuclear apocalypse recognized merely because the Ghoul — will get punched out a window.
A brief stroll away on an indoor stage, Ella Purnell and Kyle MacLachlan have been filming their characters’ long-anticipated reunion. The cameras are on Purnell’s Lucy MacLean, a sheltered former Vault dweller who’s traveled from the California coast to New Vegas in pursuit of her father.
“My little Sugarbomb,” says MacLachlan as Hank MacLean to a woozy Lucy simply earlier than she passes out. Amongst these observing the takes on the screens are “Fallout” showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.
Each moments happen inside the ultimate minutes of “The Wrangler,” the fifth episode of the Prime Video collection’ second season, which sees Lucy and the Ghoul lastly make their method by way of the streets of the post-apocalyptic remnants of Sin Metropolis after trekking by way of the Mojave Desert collectively.
An adaptation of the favored online game franchise, “Fallout” is about in an alternate future round 200 years after a lot of the world was decimated by nuclear bombs. Some People, together with Lucy’s father Hank, survived by shifting right into a community of underground bunkers referred to as Vaults, whereas others had been left to fend for themselves within the Wasteland.
In a flashback, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) visits Las Vegas in “Fallout” Season 2.
(Lorenzo Sisti / Prime Video)
Not like lots of the areas featured within the collection to this point, New Vegas is one which followers of the franchise are very aware of as a result of it’s the setting of the 2010 recreation “Fallout: New Vegas.”
Though incorporating such an iconic setting got here with its personal challenges, the attract of taking the story to New Vegas was too irresistible for the present’s inventive crew.
“When Lucy left the Vault, she was very innocent, very naive,” says Robertson-Dworet. By the top of the primary season, “she’s had a couple of weeks in the Wasteland and she’s certainly had her eyes opened a fair amount. But she is on a journey to follow her father and uncover even darker secrets. So the idea of taking her to the actual City of Sin was incredibly appealing at a metaphorical or character level.”
Audiences have seen how Lucy’s time on the floor world has been affecting her. And her first day in New Vegas has been a doozy: She encountered terrifying mutated reptilian creatures generally known as Deathclaws, has been coping with a drug habit, dedicated some theft and even killed a person.
“As we get closer to Vegas … you really start to get to see how much [the Ghoul has] rubbed off on her,” govt producer Jonathan Nolan says. “That fundamental question of ‘Is she willing to to break some of the same rules that he is?’ is one of the driving questions of the narrative. How far is too far and … how many of her carefully fostered beliefs … will survive the journey through the Wasteland?”
The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) sitting alone contained in the Atomic Wrangler Lodge room in “Fallout.”
(Prime Video)
Bethesda Recreation Studios’ Todd Howard, who serves as an govt producer of the “Fallout” collection, acknowledges that bringing New Vegas into the present for Season 2 added “an element of difficulty above and beyond that of Season 1.”
“It’s exciting because you’re going to an iconic ‘Fallout’ location, but it’s also tricky because players know it,” Howard explains. “It’s easier, creatively, to go someplace [players] don’t know, but to take the show to a place that they know and love so much, you really have to be extra careful.”
The dilemma for the present’s inventive crew concerned the stability between online game accuracy and the realities of constructing sensible units. Whereas utilizing a digital background would allow the present to recreate the exact geography of the video games, the crew’s goal is to attempt to construct and use as many actual units, props and results as potential.
“Our feeling was always … that we can make it more cinematic, more tactile, if we actually build [New Vegas],” Robertson-Dworet says. “The trade off is going to be [that] maybe we are not going to get it right down to the pixel the way fans remember it. [But] the level of commitment to the games and [to] honoring the games as much as we possibly can is very real.”
Understandably, the “Fallout” crew was not capable of construct a whole metropolis from the bottom up. So as an alternative of incorporating each constructing on the New Vegas map, they aimed to incorporate some favorites together with ones that greatest served the story.
The “Fallout” solid and crew on the Freeside set in Santa Clarita.
(Lorenzo Sisti/Prime Video)
Freeside, which is the district that exists within the remnants of Las Vegas’ Fremont Road, was constructed on loads in Santa Clarita beforehand utilized by exhibits like “Westworld” and “Deadwood,” whereas a defunct shopping center was reworked into the New Vegas Strip.
“Because I’m dealing with real buildings that exist in the real world, it’s not laid out exactly the same as it is in the game,” says Howard Cummings, the present’s manufacturing designer. “I put some greatest hits of Freeside, essentially, in a three-block radius on one street. They are laid out progressively similar to the game, but not the [exact] relationship in the actual game.”
One of many focal factors in Freeside is the Atomic Wrangler, a multi-story on line casino and bar with lodging that was featured in “Fallout: New Vegas.”
“The Atomic Wrangler was so specific in the game,” says Cummings. “It has specific architecture and has this terrific neon sign that I love with the cowboy … There’s no way to take [a building that] already existed [on set] and have it look like the Atomic Wrangler … so I put a facade in front of a facade.”
A few of that wizardry went into the inside of the Atomic Wrangler as nicely. The primary flooring bar space, as an example, is definitely housed in a distinct constructing throughout the dust road.
“It was the old saloon in ‘Westworld,’” says Cummings, who was additionally the manufacturing designer on Nolan’s sci-fi western that aired for 4 seasons on HBO. “Turning that right into a ‘50s nightclub was really fun. What used to be the stage in the old saloon got shifted to the other side.”
Lucy (Ella Purnell) browses the merchandise in Sonny’s Sundries.
(Prime Video)
The “Fallout” collection marks the primary tv mission for Howard, who is understood for his work on the “Fallout” and “Elder Scrolls” collection of video video games. In addition to the dimensions of the manufacturing, what has shocked him essentially the most has been simply how a lot the present does make the most of sensible designs and results.
“I thought more of it would be fake,” Howard says. However “they really wanted to make everything as practical as possible. … It’s not just the scale of it, but the level of detail and the small things — I was pretty blown away. I thought there’d be more ‘movie magic,’ fakery, but no.”
He remembers visiting the Vault set for the primary time through the present’s first season and being amazed that not solely had the crew constructed a full Vault individuals may stroll by way of, however how even the smallest element — like a multi-page report on an official’s desk — was absolutely fabricated.
This consideration to element is clear inside New Vegas as nicely, from the assorted items offered at Sonny’s Sundries (at marked-up costs) to the working screens of all sizes seen in a sure govt penthouse.
For Nolan, strolling onto New Vegas for the primary time got here with a novel sense of familiarity due to having performed the video games.
“The Germans haven’t come up with a phrase for it yet, but there’s the form of deja vu that you get when you enter a physical version of a space that you’ve come to know virtually,” says Nolan, who explains he felt that sense for the primary time when he visited Miami after coming to know town in a “Grand Theft Auto” online game.
However what he particularly delighted in was with the ability to characteristic a Deathclaw outdoors the Strip.
“Fallout” govt producers James Altman, left, and Jonathan Nolan and co-executive producer Noreen O’Toole on the video village.
(Lorenzo Sisti / Prime Video)
“The Deathclaw [is] such a hallmark of that of that game,” says Nolan. “Everyone begins ‘Fallout: New Vegas’ by looking at Vegas and going, ‘Oh, I’ll walk to Vegas.’ The reason you can’t just do that is the Deathclaw, you find that out very quickly, so bringing that to life and spending time on set with the amazing artists of Legacy [Effects] and [Industrial Light & Magic] … was just an extraordinary collaboration.”
Whereas the primary season of “Fallout” was filmed in New York (and different areas), the crew moved the manufacturing to California for Season 2. The transfer concerned disassembling the Vault units and transporting them throughout the nation in 77 semitrucks to be rebuilt once more — this time all related on one sound stage — in L.A.
Nolan says “Fallout’s” transfer again to California was “largely for creative reasons” and to reconnect together with his former “Westworld” crew members, however he has additionally been outspoken in regards to the significance of getting Hollywood productions again to California. He even invited state lawmakers on set whereas filming Season 2 to point out them the significance of California’s movie and TV tax credit score program to reverse the exodus of Hollywood productions.
“We’re hopeful,” says Nolan. “We’re going to keep shooting ‘Fallout’ here. Season 3 [is] heading into production, hopefully, later this year and we’re going to do our part. But hopefully other people will be pushing hard to bring as much production back to California as possible.”
