Macaulay Culkin has been announced to be joining the cast of Amazon’s Fallout show.
As reported by Deadline, Culkin is playing a “crazy genius-type character,” who will also be a recurring character in the show. We have no additional information for now, but it is possible that Culkin’s role is a character who may turn out to be a key character in the Fallout timeline.
He may even turn out to be playing someone who has appeared in the games in one way or another. This may be speculation, but considering that production companies Kilter Films and Bethesda intend to keep the series canonical to the video game franchise, this is all absolutely in play.
Now, his brother Kieran Culkin has arguably found bigger success as a star today, thanks to his role in HBO show Succession. But Macaulay has arguably cemented his legacy as one of the most successful child actors of all time. Between the Home Alone movies, Richie Rich, My Girl, and The Good Son, he was absolutely an inescapable fixture in pop culture, until he chose to retire.
That retirement really only lasted six years, as he returned to acting at age 20 in the West End theatrical production of Madame Melville. Through the past two decades, he has played small, if memorable roles. Like many of his peers, like Elijah Wood and Daniel Radcliffe, Culkin seemed content to pick roles that he was personally interested in, instead of continuing to pursue headliner superstardom, the career path chosen by actors like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ryan Gosling.
So it’s certainly interesting that Culkin landed into this video game adaptation. It may be he has a personal interest in Fallout himself, as he has revealed in the Bunny Ears podcast that he grew up to be the exact same kidult like the fans who grew up with him turned out. As Deadline had pointed out his agency, it’s also possible that the Amazon show went shopping for a role that is genuinely compelling to actors looking to do something that isn’t leading man stuff.
And if you look at Fallout, it is absolutely atypical of the current pop culture appetite, and even in its own post-apocalyptic genre. While some movies and shows like it, such as A Boy And Its Dog, arguably has a similar biting satirical edge, the Amazon show has a particularly strong direction in managing to bring together pathos and black humor, that only really talented storytellers can pull off in any media.
We’re going to go out on a limb and point out that Fallout’s tritagonists are openly the major factions and groups in the franchise’s universe, between a Dweller, a Ghoul, and a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. Culkin could be introducing another new group or faction to the show, and here’s where you get to speculate on who or what that could be.
