Macaulay Culkin has taken a sparing approach to acting over the last decade or two; a few episodes of American Horror Story here, a brief but memorable appearance on The Righteous Gemstones there. Now, Culkin’s apparently getting into the increasingly attention-grabbing world of TV video game adaptations, with Deadline reporting tonight that the Home Alone star/pizza cover artist has signed on for a part in Prime Video’s Fallout show.
Fallout is gearing up for its second season, after its first did a surprisingly good job at capturing at least parts of the tone of the game series it draws from—two parts existentially bleak to one part absurdly silly, roughly. The series already did pretty well on the casting front, with Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, and Culkin’s estranged Gemstones dad Walton Goggins in the starring parts as a crew of survivors trying to find some measure of meaning out in the wastes. Guest star stints on the series included memorable appearances from Michael Emerson, Matt Berry, Michael Rappaport, Sarita Choudhury, and more, helping to fill out a Wasteland roster that polite people might call “colorful,” and honest people would call “mostly terrifyingly psychotic.”
Details about Culkin’s role on the series are being kept secret, although he’s apparently playing “a crazy genius-type character,” an archetype the Fallout universe doesn’t exactly lack for. The show’s first season (which ran a plotline largely independent from any one game in the franchise) ended with a suggestion it’d be doing some kind of light adaptation of critical darling Fallout: New Vegas; feels worth noting that that particular entry includes some of the craziest scientists in the whole Wasteland in one of its expansions, so here’s hoping we get to see Macaulay Culkin floating around as a hovering brain in a jar.
Fallout was renewed for a second season on Prime not long after its first aired; no word yet on when said second season will arrive, Culkin in tow.
