Walton Goggins is a crucial part of HBO’s “Fallout,” but an earlier role with the network helped him secure the beloved part of the Ghoul. That would be his supporting turn as the conniving Lee Russell in the dark comedy series “Vice Principals,” created by Danny McBride and Jody Hill.
“He gives a jaw-droppingly bold performance in that show,” co-creator and co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet told the Television Academy’s Emmy magazine in December 2025. “Pushing a character as far as Walton did was such a masterful performance; I wanted to see him bring something like that to our Ghoul.”
She noted that Goggins’ role in “Fallout” — portraying both the pre-war actor Cooper Howard and his post-apocalyptic Ghoul counterpart, a sarcastic, irradiated anti-hero — was built around him. “[Those] were the only parts in the whole series that were written with a specific actor in mind,” she added.
“It’s always risky to go after a specific actor, because it’s just a great way to get your heart broken, but there are only a handful of actors who have as much dexterity in both comedy and drama as Walton,” executive producer Jonathan Nolan added. “There’s a charisma that just radiates off him.”
Why Walton Goggins was the right fit
“He knows his craft very well and doesn’t require a lot of handholding,” Jonathan Nolan told Emmy magazine of Walton Goggins. “There was seldom anything that I brought to him that he hadn’t already considered. And it’s just so much fun with actors that smart and that committed.”
Goggins was just as eager to join the show, quickly signing on when Geneva Robertson-Dworet and her co-creator and showrunner Graham Wagner approached him — even before knowing all the details.
“It was like, ‘Okay, yes. I’m in. I’ll do it,'” Goggins told Emmy magazine, highlighting that he was already a fan of the show’s creators and wanted to work with them. “And they said, ‘Don’t you want to know who you’re going to play?’ And I said, ‘It’s irrelevant.'”
He became even more enthusiastic once he learned about the role’s depth. “They went on to explain it was this character of the Ghoul, who had been walking the wasteland for 200 years. But he was also the portal through which the audience gets to participate in the world before it changed,” Goggins explained. “I read the first couple of scripts, and I had never read anything quite like it. The gravitas of the ending of the world — how meaningful that was — resonated very deeply with me.”