Austin's Aaron Moten's Trip From Batboy to Fallout

Aaron Moten (right) faces a tuneful apocalypse in new Prime series Fallout, based on the Bethesda Software games (Courtesy of Prime Video, © Amazon Content Services LLC)

It's a long way from a college production of Batboy: The Musical to stomping in stolen armor across the post-apocalyptic world of Prime's Fallout, but Aaron Moten made it. "A long, long way, my friend," the Austin actor laughs. "Did my mother write you an email?"

Co-star Ella Purnell wrinkles her forehead a little. "I'm going to need the context here."

OK, here's the context. Before he was cast in the big-budget adaptation of the Bethesda Software smash hit Fallout series, Moten was a regular on the Austin theatre scene, including a memorable turn in a 2008 production of the comedy musical at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University.

"Oh, indeed?" Purnell queries.

"I played the sheriff," Moten beams. That was far from his only memorable appearance on local stages, picking up a B. Iden Payne Awards nomination for his performance in Oklahoma! before winning an award the following year for his turn as Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Now he's playing Maximus, a young dreamer who wants to become one of the Brotherhood of Steel, armored protectors of an America recovering from nuclear war in Fallout, a gruesome and hilarious romp with mutants, conspiracies, hyperviolence, and a jukebox full of vintage tunes.

Ella Purnell as chirpy vault dweller Lucy in Fallout, the new series from Prime (Image Courtesy of Prime Video, © Amazon Content Services LLC)

Not that he's the only cast member with more than screen acting on his résumé. When Purnell got the call to play chirpy vault dweller Lucy MacLean, she might reasonably have expected it to be an audition for the next installment of the game. After all, she's an experienced voice actor, having voiced Jinx in Netflix's Arcane, and Vau N'Akat Ambassaor Gwyn in Star Trek: Prodigy. Luckily, she met with series creators/showrunners/writers Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, and Executive Producer/Director Jonathan Nolan before she read the script, "so I knew kind of what it was, but they wanted to get on Zoom and explain it to me." That said, if it had been for the game, she wouldn't complain. "Maybe that's in my future. Maybe we need to petition it."

This is the first leading role on a TV show of this scale for either actor. Even after that experience, Moten says he still regarded theatre as the most difficult venue for an actor, having to base your life every day around a production "so at 7pm you're ready to jump off that springboard." However, a show the size of Fallout is no walk in the park. The biggest difference, he contends, is the stamina required by an episodic drama. "It was a long shoot, and when your regular Tuesday is an action scene you have to know how to recover – physically, and sometimes mentally. As actors, it's about knowing how to let go of your work when you go home. A dog can be helpful with that."

Luckily for Michael Emerson, the part of Dr. Siggi Wilzig came with its own canine companion: CX404, played by dog actor Lana5. "It's in my contract now," he laughs.

"The double act of Michael and a somewhat well-trained Belgian Malinois?" Nolan says. "Irresistible."

Over the 27 years since the original Fallout game debuted on PCs, the mood of the games has changed, and establishing exactly what kind of Fallout they wanted to create was the first job for the showrunners. Robertson-Dworet called those initial discussions about tone "really thrilling [because] we have 25, 30 years of incredible stuff to pull from, and then you're like, 'Oh, fuck, we actually have to choose. We can't put everything in.' It sucks to leave things out that you really wanted to put in. That's why we're praying for a season two."

In the effort to boil down thousands of hours of gameplay across across four core titles (plus multiple spinoffs, the MMO Fallout 76, and even a pinball game) into eight one-hour episodes, Robertson-Dworet said they sought to capture the tone that makes Fallout "unique among the pantheon of great games. It is weirdly funny, violent as hell, dramatic, full of weird moral dilemmas and interesting cultures that you encounter. I hope that we managed to bring that interesting blend and juxtaposition of things to the screen."

Moreover, there was no attempt to build one unified single version of the Fallout mythos, but instead to say that it's all true and all takes place somewhere in this big, blasted, dangerous, monster-infested world. "We did our best to just blur our eyes and take it all in," Wagner concludes.

As director of the first three episodes, it fell to Nolan to translate that tone to the screen. He approached the project as a fan of the games, "and I knew that the thing that I could add to the project – hopefully – was trying to figure out the somewhat daunting task of translating the feeling that you get in the game where you can walk over that mountain range, or pick up this item and examine it."

But what was harder: working out which kind of Fallout they wanted to make or getting clearances for the near-constant soundtrack of mid-century pop classics. "The clearances," Wagner admits. However, it wouldn't be Fallout without them. Moreover, those needle drops help the show avoid being "just sad on sad. ... The best way to offset the post-apocalyptic wasteland is a nice track from the Ink Spots."

Michael Emerson as Dr. Siggi Wilzig in Fallout, the new series from Prime (Image Courtesy of Prime Video, © Amazon Content Services LLC)

As the series begins, all three characters are off in their own separate corners of the world. Lucy's forced out of her comfortable bunker life into the deadly world above: Maximus is finding out the hard way that being a squire for one of the knights of the Brotherhood is not the chivalrous calling he thought it would be: and Dr. Wilzig finds himself rebelling against the sinister machination of Vault-Tec, the evil corporation that may have sparked Armageddon. "I was happy that I had so much screen time to establish who Wilzig was," Emerson says. "Seeing him in the lab, working with animals, you learn a lot about him even if he says very little."

Each of the actors has that kind of opening solo introduction, and both Moten and Purnell praised the work of production designer Howard Cummings in building the world right out to the edges. "It's the gift that keeps on giving because there's so much to unravel," Purnell observes. "You've got all these incredible characters, this rich tapestry of storylines that's woven together, and the sets and costumes and production design, then the game and the decades of lore behind it, you can just keep digging forever."

Fallout is streaming now on Prime.