Fallout director Jonathan Nolan is happy to be experiencing some laughs after years of working on serious movie fare with his brother Christopher Nolan and creating the hit sci-fi series Westworld.
Jonathan Nolan, who goes by Jonah, directs the first three episodes of the smash streaming series on Prime Video. In addition, Nolan and his wife/creative collaborator, Lisa Joy, are among the executive producers of Fallout, which of course is the series adaptation of the blockbuster video game saga from Todd Howard and Bethesda Softworks.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world more than 200 years after nuclear blasts bombarded the U.S., Fallout features several key aesthetic elements from the video game as well as such characters as vault dwellers, ghouls, raiders and members of the Brotherhood of Steel.
Fallout stars Ella Purnell as vault dweller Lucy MacLean and Kyle McLachlan as her father, Hank — as well as Walton Goggins as the post-apocalyptic cowboy The Ghoul and Aaron Moten as Brotherhood of Steel squire Maximus.
While some elements of Fallout are deathly serious — it’s rooted in a nuclear apocalypse, after all — the series is loaded with laughs, which is something Nolan admitted he’s never really experienced in his prior film and television endeavors.
“Fallout is the closest I’ve come to my career to comedy because it’s such a crucial part of the original franchise,” Nolan told me in a recent Zoom interview. “One of the reasons we wanted to make this project is because I’ve never quite experienced anything like the tone of these games. They’re dark. They’re very violent. They’re political, subversive, weird — but they’re funny and almost goofy in places.”
Nolan Is Grateful To Work With So Many Comedy Creatives
Jonah Nolan said among the most exciting aspects of making Fallout was the opportunity to work with several talented creatives from the comedy world. Among them are showrunners and head script writers Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, as well as an acting ensemble with plenty of comedic experience.
Wagner, for example, has written for such comedy hits as The Office and Silicon Valley and was a key writer and producer on Portlandia. The Fallout cast, meanwhile, includes Portlandia star Kyle McLachlan and Walton Goggins — who plays the uproarious Baby Billy Freeman in The Righteous Gemstones.
On the flip side, Nolan has worked almost exclusively in dramas and the dark realm of superhero lore, having co-written Memento, The Prestige, Interstellar, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with his director brother Christopher Nolan.
“Growing up with Chris, for the most part, when you show up to set on one of our projects you’re word-perfect. The script is the script,” Jonah Nolan explained. “But with Fallout — the scripts were beautifully written — but we had an opportunity in many places to improvise a little bit and to play, and that was something new for me. It was exciting but a little frightening.”
All eight episodes of Fallout are available on Prime Video, which recently renewed the series for a second season.
