‘Fallout’ Season 2: Walton Goggins On Re-Entering The Wasteland, Tarantino, & Marvel Misses [Bingeworthy Podcast]

The Wasteland doesn’t care who you are. It burns everyone the same. “Fallout” returns for Season 2 with a broader canvas and more confidence, expanding its ensemble-driven apocalypse while keeping its eye on the emotional wreckage left behind. Set in a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, the series follows citizens forced to survive in underground bunkers while the surface world fills with radiation, mutants, bandits, and moral rot. The show stars Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Moises Arias, and more.

Joining Bingeworthy for this episode is Walton Goggins, who returns as Cooper Howard / “The Ghoul,” and he’s quick to frame Season 2 as an evolution rather than a victory lap. Having lived through shows that found new depth after their first year, he knows the difference between simply getting louder and genuinely digging in. “If you can get a Season 1 right, if you tell a story that moves you or makes you feel something, then with the second one, if you care about it as much as the people on this show care, you can really dig deeper,” Goggins said. “That’s what these writers did. That’s what these directors did. Everybody showed up and gave their best every single day.”

READ MORE: ‘Fallout’ Season 2 Review: A Slow Burn Defines An Otherwise Excellent Second Quest

That level of care extends all the way down to the daily grind of becoming The Ghoul again. Even after Season 1, Goggins described the transformation as a ritual that demands patience and focus. The hours fall into a familiar rhythm: coffee and conversation while immobilized, a movie to let his head drift, music, then silence. And somewhere in that quiet, the switch flips. “By the time the last seal goes on and I walk back into my room, it’s what happens between that moment and putting on those boots,” he said. “That’s when it clicks. That’s him.” The process isn’t gentle, though, and there are days when the suit pushes back hard. “I’m good for eight or nine hours,” he admitted, “but there have been moments where I’ve looked at the director and said, ‘You gotta turn the shot right now. I gotta get out.’ And they do. Everybody’s on my side.”

Season 2 also reshapes the role of The Ghoul within the larger ensemble. In Season 1, survival was transactional, and Lucy barely registered as a person to him. Goggins didn’t soften that truth. “She wasn’t human to me. She was bait,” he said. “There was no moral ambiguity. I didn’t need anything from her. The Ghoul doesn’t need shit from Lucy.” As the story unfolds and alliances shift, he finds himself navigating something new, not just with Lucy, but within a world that continually forces people into proximity. “This guy hasn’t been around someone for that amount of time in forever,” he said. “He doesn’t travel with anyone. So you start thinking about things like how close are they walking, who’s ahead, how long the silence lasts.”

That ambiguity extends to Cooper Howard himself. Goggins argued that even after everything we’ve seen, the audience still doesn’t truly know him. “You don’t really f**king know anything about him,” he said. “You experience the end of the world through him, but you don’t understand him.” Season 2 begins to confront that gap as Cooper realizes how much information he’s been missing. “I feel like he’s a metaphor for the person who doesn’t have the information,” Goggins added. “He’s behind the curve. And once you realize how much you don’t know, that can drive a person mad. You’re just trying to make sense of it and hold on.”

Late in the conversation, Goggins also reflected on his time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where he played Sonny Burch in “Ant-Man and the Wasp”. While he has no regrets, he admitted there was a sense that the character had more room to grow. “I’ve talked to Peyton about that,” he said. “It’s like, ah, f**k… there was something else there.” Maybe Marvel didn’t know what they had. Still, he was realistic about the scale of the machine he stepped into. “It was never going to be my movie,” Goggins said, noting that those films belong to Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly. Looking back, he doesn’t second-guess the choice. “I made a really good friend in Peyton,” Goggins said. “And I don’t want anything in my life to have changed.”

The discussion also turned to Quentin Tarantino (NOTE: This interview took place before Quentin’s controversial comments on Paul Dano, Matthew Lillard, etc.), a filmmaker Goggins has long called his favorite director, including a near-miss that almost put him in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. “There was something in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ and it just, the timing didn’t work out.”

With Tarantino now handing off the Cliff Booth story to David Fincher and approaching what he says will be his final film, Goggins made it clear he would never chase a role in either film. “I would never call him and ask,” he said. “If he needs you, you’re there. That’s kind of the deal.” Having already collaborated with Tarantino on “The Hateful Eight” and “Django Unchained,” Goggins feels more than fulfilled. “I’ve won, man,” he said. “I’ve gotten two big rides on that carousel. A f**king stallion on that carousel.”

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Season 2 of “Fallout” premieres December 16, 2025, on Prime Video, with new episodes released weekly. Listen to the full interview with Walton Goggins below:

Bingeworthy is part of The Playlist Podcast Network, which includes Deep Focus, The Discourse, and more. We can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, and most places where podcasts are found. You can stream the podcast via the embed within the article. Be sure to subscribe and drop us a comment or a rating, as we greatly appreciate it. Thank you for listening.

Mike DeAngelo

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