“No, I haven’t sat down to play the games,” said Walton Goggins, who plays pre-war movie star Cooper Howard and his post-war counterpart The Ghoul. “And I won’t. I won’t. I won’t play the games. I’m not interested.”
The reason is actually pretty simple: Goggins doesn’t want to think of the world or the characters of Fallout as elements of a game.
“All of a sudden, I’m looking at this world from a very different perspective, and as something on a screen in which I am an avatar in. I don’t believe that I’m an avatar. I believe The Ghoul exists in the world. I believe that Cooper Howard exists in the world.” he said.
“The best way that I can serve this world and serve the fans of this game, I think, is to go to work every single day and believe the circumstances that I’m presented with,” Goggins said.
Yeah, it actually also makes sense for an actor to avoid seeing other films with that character if they’re going to portray an entirelly new version of that character.
In Method Acting character building is a lot about what are the motivations and drives of the “person” which is the character and “living truthfully (the character’s life) under imaginary circunstances” and judging by how he talks about it he is indeed using Method Acting.
As for games, they might be an even worse influence than previous films because the emotional depth of in game characters is generally zero or close to it (except in things like cutscenes were they used actors, MOCAP and a very detailed model for expressions), akin to a woden performance.
It’s valid for an actor using Method Acting not to want to be exposed to a different representation of the world their character is supposed to inhabit and of the characters in that world - Method Acting is pretty “soft and smooshy” rather than a set of iron rules and mechanisms, relying on a person’s own “emotional engine” and ability to pretty much forget that they’re not that “person” which is the character living those things (think of it as an actor’s version of suspension of disbelief) so who knows what influences the actor might take in subconsciously which then affect their embodyment of that character, which would be a bigger concern now that they’ve already embodied that character (for the last season of the series) and that should not change for actor reasons rather than character reasons (i.e. the character should only change due to things that happen to the character).
No doubt some actors would think that playing the game would make no difference, but it’s valid for some to think it might.
The character does not exist in any of the games so your argument doesn’t apply.
A somewhat different version of that world and of characters similar to the one he’s acting exists in the games.
When building a character for acting one bases oneself in the script to “fill-in the blanks” of “how would this person feel in these circumstances”, based on things like the past of that person, the world around them and past events (sometimes actors using Method Action will even during rehearsal enact an important events of a character’s past which are NOT on the script, just to try and get an impression of how that might have shaped that imaginary person).
So it still makes sense that now, after he built a character based on the script’s version of that world and of people like that character in it, he would avoid different versions of that world and those people.
Mind you, he might just not be at all a gamer and this is just an excuse not to play the game. Then again he might genuinely want to avoid the negative side effects for his character building of being exposed to two different versions of the same world - it is a valid consideration for some actors. Only he knows if it’s a genuine reason or just some bollocks he said to get fans of the games of his back.