‘Fallout’s’ Aaron Moten on Maximus: There’s a ‘war going on inside of him’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
[WARNING: The following story contains spoilers about Season 1 of “Fallout.”]
Aaron Moten was not exactly familiar with “Fallout,” the game, when “Fallout,” the TV show, came to him. “I think if I had seen a poster, if I had seen a photograph of the T-60 — the big power armor suit — I would’ve recognized it to be ‘Fallout,’ but yeah, totally new to me,” he tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “The world, the deep dive, if you will.”
The actor did a deep dive into gamers and Twitch streamers to prep for his audition, but after landing the part of Maximus, he made a conscious choice not to play the game. “My job as an actor always feels like bringing a human element to something. I felt that if I jumped into the video game, I think I’d be overly concerned with other things happening on set than what I need to be concerned with,” he explains. “Or maybe try to plug some of my favorite things into scenes where they don’t belong. It felt more freeing to just focus on the script, the words and my scene partners.”
There was also freedom in the storytelling. While it is based on the post-apocalyptic game, the Amazon Prime Video series tells a wholly original story. “Fans of the game have a better educated guessing system as to what’s happening next, but it’s an interesting ride for everyone whether you know the games or not,” Moten adds. To play Maximus, a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel in the irradiated wasteland of 2296 Los Angeles, Moten found inspiration in the Elizabethan era, specifically William Shakespeare‘s “Julius Caesar.”
“He describes Cassius’ ambition like [that of] a hungry dog. And I think that I really loved the image and I really wanted to bring this tension to Maximus at all times,” the actor shares. “Yes, that war going on inside of him, but whenever he changes and wants something different that it has this real hunger to it and it’s a real almost desperate of his desire for something. That’s kind of where I started from. How do you even begin to imagine … what it’s like to grow up in the wasteland and find yourself in the ranks of the Brotherhood of Steel? It was a real launchpad, that image, to get us into the right ballpark.”
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While he’s part of a literal brotherhood, Maximus is a bullied, lonely soul who’s trying to find himself, his purpose, real friends and a place to truly belong. In most of the eight-episode first season, Maximus is not himself — he pretends to be the late Knight Titus (Michael Rapaport), donning his T-60 power armor, around his new squire Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), and he introduces himself as Titus to vault dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell).
“A really interesting thing that I always enjoy about people — and we all do this — is we’re different depending on who is in the room with us. I think we did a good job of putting so many versions of Maximus into the interrogation scene. Even when he’s not given words when he’s shifting through these different phases in his mind, he’s really trying to be something that he feels like he isn’t but he inherently is that thing. And maybe it’s heroic, you know what I mean?” Moten says. “I actually feel like I love the task of finding the real Maximus when looking through the series because he does show himself, but he really does also cover and pretend quite a lot. But, boy, what is that like for him? I think he is, inherently, wanting to trust.”
And when he does trust, he feels he’s been betrayed, whether it’s real or not. Maximus comes clean to Thaddeus, who is totally not cool with him having let Titus die and impersonating him, leading to a fight between them that ends with Thaddeus taking out his armor’s fusion core. In the finale, after getting knocked out by Lucy’s dad, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), Maximus wakes up searching for Lucy, who had previously invited him to live in her vault, unaware that she had told him while he was unconscious that she was leaving with the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) to find answers and meet her maker. The Brotherhood, meanwhile, mistakenly thinks Maximus had killed Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) and declares him a knight. As the Brotherhood cheers him on and finally embraces him, Maximus is overcome with conflicting emotions, setting the stage for various paths for him to go down in a potential second season.
“I think we can all relate to something like that in our lives. You chase something for a long time and by the time you get it, you’ve moved on. He was trying to move on. It’s this horrible, I think, feeling for him to be stuck, to have to settle for a life that is opposite of what his morals were maybe taking him,” Moten says. “It seemed like he was maybe bending toward this life with Lucy and going into a vault and be happy. I think he’s got some ideal of that newly placed in his mind. And now we have the trouble of, will he be forced into more violent acts? Who will he be by the time he gets to see Lucy again? Will he have walked through the fire and be different because of it? Is he going to try to hold on to what he’s taken from that character and change?”
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