‘Fallout’ Season 2 Finale: Justin Theroux on Mr. House, His Bond with the Ghoul & Season 3 Hopes

Fallout Season 2 came to a shocking conclusion, delivering a mix of long-awaited answers as well as a bevy of new questions that fans will carry into the wait for next season. At the center of it all stands Robert House, whose true motives and far-reaching influence continue to reshape the series’ vision of the wasteland, leaving viewers to wonder just how much of the future has been engineered by his hand.

By the end of Season 2, House’s consciousness has been returned to New Vegas, and his flickering visage on a screen from his derelict penthouse confirms that he remains an active player in the events yet to come. While the series has already been renewed, exactly what role House will assume and how deeply his plans will shape the next chapter remain tantalizing mysteries, setting the stage for an even more dangerous and unpredictable Season 3.

TV Inside sat down with Justin Theroux to talk about the reception to the character, his unlikely friendship with the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), fan theories, and what he would like to see for Season 3.

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I don’t know if you’ve read the reviews from fans, but your performance has been extraordinarily well-received by the fanbase. Does this mean anything to you, considering how devoted they are to the source?

Justin Theroux: Oh, that’s nice, yeah. And I’m grateful if that’s true. Whenever you step into anything pre-existing, you run the risk of really upsetting people. But I tried as much as possible. So to block that out of my mind, honor it, of course. But the only thing I can do is work very, very hard to bring whatever I can to make the character good. The writing does 90% of that.

I have a bunch of them written down, if you need an ego boost.

Send them to my mom, she’d love that.

The show sets up a great bait-and-switch when the Ghoul says the end of the world “started with just one man.” We assume he meant House, but later realize he’s probably talking about himself. How did that misdirection affect the way you played House, knowing the audience would initially see him as the likely villain?

It’s a boring answer, but I really just look at the scripts, what I say in the scenes, what my intentions are in the scenes. What I want in the scenes is all really sort of acting or Script Breakdown 101, and then just play the sh** out of that and try not to worry about where it’s going or what it’s come from. I’m just trying to be a piece of a watch, like I’m the second hand, or I’m the cog, the minute hand. So in that sense, I know who the story is about, obviously.

The one thing I did really like was that he’s the one character in the show who knows Cooper Howard on both sides of the coin. So everyone in the future, obviously, present, knows of him as the ghoul. I still know him as Cooper Howard. He’s the only one still calling him Cooper Howard, even though he’s been burned beyond recognition and has 6,00 scars all over his body. So he’s the only one who sees him as the same man, as a continuous person. I really liked that aspect of it.

In the finale, House is proven right about Cooper Howard: he isn’t really a cowboy; he’s a killer, whether he meant to be or not. What do you think that means to the character of House to be proven correct even though it all goes to hell?

Well, we’ve seen going forward what it means because he is a killer.  I think he came to that realization just by thinking a copious amount about that one man and playing out essentially all the possibilities for his future. Obviously, with certain variables, you know?

As far as where it goes, I have no clue. No one’s written me an email saying, “Oh, by the way, here’s where everything’s going.” So in that sense, I’m like any other fan, I’m in the middle of the book, or the beginning of the book, or towards the end of the book. I don’t know where I am in the story.

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There’s a fascinating dynamic between House and the Ghoul, he warns Cooper Howard in the past, but his disembodied conscience strikes an almost a devil’s bargain over the fate of the Ghoul’s family. I wouldn’t call them friends, but there is respect. How would you define their relationship?

I define it as sort of a Midnight Run, [Robert] De Niro and [Charles] Grodin, reluctant road buddies. I don’t know what I would call it. I think it’s a marriage of convenience. It’s all about self-preservation, and he had to strike that bargain so that he wouldn’t be turned off. Frankly, who knows whether he’s even telling the truth half the time. You know when [the Gould] says, “What would happen if I shot this thing?” [Referring to the cold-fusion diode.] He says, “Other planets would explode.” Who knows if that is even true?

There are a lot of fan theories out there, but one people seem to gravitate toward is comparing the Fallout story to The Wizard of Oz, with House occupying that Wizard position. From your perspective, is that parallel meaningful to the story you’re telling about power and illusion?

In straight storytelling terms, oftentimes things line up, right? Like any romantic movie out there, [might] line up with Romeo and Juliet, or the works of Shakespeare, or Greek tragedy, or myth. So some of those things are, I’m sure, coincidental, and some of those things are straight storytelling, and some of them perhaps could be intentional, I don’t know.

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As far as House being some kind of an Oz figure, just strictly speaking, in terms of the game, he is the imposing guy on a television screen, literally a talking head who, when you figuratively pull back the curtain, you realize he’s just this withered body sitting in a cryochamber of sorts. So who knows? I honestly don’t know. I couldn’t anticipate what he has turned into, or whether he’s even there anymore.

As a fan of the game, the show is now bypassing the written narrative for the character. Where do you hope to see Robert House in Season 3?

My hopes — and again, I’m speaking purely as a fan — I would love to see his origin story. I’d love to see what made House. Not in a spin-off kind of way. I like him most when you see him in the flesh. In the future or present, I want him to retain his emotional fragility, frankly. I would hope that he wouldn’t become just something on a screen. I think he works best when you can play both sides of him.

That being said, in the future/present, I would hope that he’s more emotional, because that just dramatically lends to more unpredictability, which is something that he relies on, but at the same time, I like seeing his temper. I like seeing when you scratch the surface on him, or when you destabilize him, what he does.

Fallout, Season 2, Now Streaming, Prime Video