Fallout's Ella Purnell on how TV show beats video game adaptation fears

With the ever-growing popularity of live-action adaptations of games comes a cemented fan base with expectations filmmakers strive to match.

While some, like The Last Of Us and The Witcher, have been widely praised and celebrated, others, like Netflix’s Resident Evil, were largely panned and quickly cancelled.

With Fallout being praised as one of the best game series of all time, the pressure was undoubtedly on to bring the retrofuturistic fantasy world the justice it deserves.

So, what makes the upcoming Fallout something that falls into the more successful adaptations? Purnell believes it’s down to appreciating where the show came from, while building a world of its own.

Speaking to RadioTimes and other press, Purnell explained: "I think one of the big challenges about adapting a video game is you're changing the entire format. You know, it's not as easy as adapting a book or creating a biopic about someone's life.

"You're going from a first-player experience, where you are playing the game and you're essentially creating a story within that world, you're taking away the major element that people play the games for, which is the ability to choose."

"I think Geneva [Robertson-Dworet] and Graham [Wagner, show creators] did a fantastic job in this, translating that essence, that theme, by giving us these three archetypal main characters of The Ghoul, Lucy and Maximus."

Set 200 years after an apocalyptic-level event, Fallout depicts the world as a devastating wasteland, practically barren and left devastated by the war that destroyed it.

Unlike other shows in the genre, Fallout has opted to create characters from scratch, with characters not based on ones in the game.

As a result, it has allowed the game to be a basis, and not a play-by-play, of how the show plays out.

Jonathan Nolan, who directed the first three episodes of the series, also believed this was a vital element in making the Fallout TV show a success.

"One of the reasons I love these games is because they're games," he explained. "They are open-world, role-playing games, you get to decide where you want to steer the story, which means a sort of rigorous adaptation is impossible.

"If you play the game, you might play it as a good guy who joins this faction, I might play it [...] as a bad guy who joins a different faction. I mean, there is no one version of any of these games, and there are seven games, and so a rigorous adaptation was impossible."

According to Purnell, the main series characters therefore give fans an option of who to get behind, and in some way, lead their own perspective of the show.

"I think they represent three, yes, characters from the games, but also three different levels of play," she continued. "You get that experience that you get playing Fallout the game, of getting to choose whether you're going to be a good guy or a bad guy.

"You know, having your choices directly influence the outcome of your journey, by giving you the Vault Dweller, who represents you at the start of the game coming out of the vault, all the way on the spectrum to The Ghoul, who… let's say has had a couple hundred hours of playtime under his belt, and is sort of the other end of the spectrum - you know, the bad guy."

Fallout will come to Prime Video on Thursday 11th April.

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