Maxance Vincent
When working on the second season of Fallout and developing the emotional journey that Maximus would have, actor Aaron Moten explains to Awards Radar on Zoom that since his character doesn’t fit into traditional archetypes, they can take him to unexpected emotional territories as he continues to question his place within the Brotherhood of Steel:
“There is this element to Maximus that we’ve always had a conversation about, that he is not an archetypal character. There’s something that’s going to feel archetypal about Lucy or The Ghoul in the way that they operate. It’s almost like you can tell which film that they’re in. I feel like, with Maximus, we wanted to take a different approach with the retro-futuristic elements of the Brotherhood of Steel. I’ve always liked what we’ve done, but we’ve got this shared experience that’s happening between the audience and us, especially now that we’ve let them in on the backstory that we half-tell in the first season of what happened to Maximus, and how he got into the Brotherhood of Steel. We’re in a shared journey where we build a character that, hopefully, by the end of it, will make you go “Oh, this has been going in this direction all along, and we got to see it happen.”
In the first half of the season, Maximus is faced with a bevy of difficult choices, and one of them occurs quite early on, as he makes the decision to kill Paladin Xander Harkness (Kumail Nanjiani), which will have major ramifications for the character when he ultimately faces Quintus (Michael Cristofer).
Approaching this pivotal emotional point, Moten explains how closely he collaborated with Nanjiani on this moment, and built a sense of chemistry, because “It was really important for us when we got into situations like that with Maximus that we gave ourselves enough time to do everything. Even Kumail’s journey with Maximus is very short-lived, but I had such a great time crafting it with him, because he’s a filmmaker as well. He and I both are camera-obsessed. We often played “What focal length are we on?” games because we were both quite good at understanding how the cameras worked.
It was really important that their friendship felt real. We could hype it up a little bit and make the audience think these guys are gonna go off together and start kicking ass. That’s also the nature of returning to a weekly release. It allowed a little bit of all of us together to kind of feel that, unless you binged it, maybe this could turn into something. Very quickly, it turns the other way, and it’s exactly how Maximus was brought to the Brotherhood of Steel, in some ways. Being an orphan and being found, how could he not relate, whether they’re ghouls or not, at his core to what he’s seeing in front of him? He has to make that decision.”
There was obviously so much to talk about in our wide-ranging conversation, which you can watch below. The world of Fallout is so richly-layered, and this season does a fantastic job at expanding the journeys of our protagonists even further, particularly Maximus, whose layers were quite interesting to unpack with Moten in our almost thirty-minute-long talk.
Check out the full interview below:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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