How ‘Fallout’ Set Design & World Building Go the Extra Mile to Honor Video Game

Damian Holbrook April 8, 2024, 6:10 pm

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Ella Purnell (Lucy) in 'Fallout' on Prime Video — Courtesy of Prime Video

Deep inside a Brooklyn sound stage is a world even crazier than the one outside: a labyrinthine maze of metallic corridors, retro-futuristic apartments filled with midcentury modern furniture and a cavernous space dominated by a floor-to-ceiling green-screen wall and rows of fake farm crops.

It’s the set for PrimeVideo’s ambitious adaptation of the globally popular video game Fallout. And married co-creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (Westworld) are not playing around.

“The attention to detail has been obsessive,” admits Nolan, adding that Bethesda Softworks even provided physical assets created for the franchise to be used onscreen as props or backgrounds. “It’s an incredible fusion of the two storytelling forms.”

Set 219 years after a nuclear event that’s driven survivors to take shelter in subterranean vaults across Earth, the darkly comic and all-new storyline follows Lucy (Ella Purnell of Yellowjackets), who has lived her entire life below ground. After a startling turn of events, she returns to the surface, where a mechanical-armored soldier from the Brotherhood of Steel and his sidekick (Aaron Moten), radiated roaches and Justified’s Walton Goggins as a noseless bounty hunter called the Ghoul are poised to make a mess of her mission.

What Is Prime Video’s ‘Fallout’? Everything We Know About the Video Game-Inspired Series

Along the way come a ton of game-inspired touches. “We embraced it,” says production designer Howard Cummings. “I even made the set designers and illustrators draw [the vaults] based on how you could actually build it if you were in the game. We didn’t fudge it.”

Nor did they fudge it up. Good thing too. You know there’d be, well, fallout if they did.

The Fallout cast also includes Kyle MacLachlan, Sarita Choudhury, Dale Dickey, Moisés Arias, Michael Emerson, Leslie Uggams, Frances Turner, Dave Register, Zach Cherry, Johnny Pemberton, Rodrigo Luzzi, Annabel O’Hagan, and Xelia Mendes-Jones. It was originally set to premiere on Friday, April 12, but Prime Video moved it up one day to Thursday, April 11.