It’s possible that nobody understands how to turn a video game into live-action entertainment better than Jonathan Nolan. The executive producer and occasional director of Fallout assembled the perfect team to capture the dark-but-quirky tone of Bethesda’s open-world post-apocalypse games. Next up, he’s taking his talents to another Bethesda-owned franchise with a very different vibe: Wolfenstein.
But when I ask about the adaptation, the first thing Nolan does is praise someone else. In this case, that’s showrunner Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers, Station Eleven).
“With Wolfenstein, we’re partnering with Patrick Somerville, who is fucking genius and a brilliant showrunner,” Nolan tells Polygon. “We’re just super lucky. It really is all about these partnerships, and just working with the greatest people. Patrick’s hard at work, and I am so excited for that show.”
The Wolfenstein games date back to 1981, and the earliest versions helped pioneer the stealth genre with its World War II story of an American soldier deep behind enemy lines. In 2014, the franchise got a major overhaul in Wolfenstein: The New Order from MachineGames and Bethesda, which jumps forward into an alternate version of the 1960s where the Nazis won WWII. A direct sequel, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017), moved the action to a Nazi-occupied America.
For Nolan, this presents a new challenge, not just because of the unfortunately relevant source material, but because of the drastic differences between Fallout’s open-world approach and Wolfenstein’s more focused narrative.
“How do you approach an adaptation? It has to be different with every project,” Nolan says. “The games are very different. Fallout are these beautiful open world games. The newer Wolfenstein games are a little more on rails. I love both of these things. They present the story in different ways and there are different things that are kind of holy within each of them.”
When Nolan first started working on Fallout, he sat down with Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, to talk about the games. The big appeal, at least for Nolan, was the larger universe the franchise had built up — each game explores a different region of the Wasteland while sharing a larger unifying mythology. The Fallout show could be its own story that exists alongside the games.
In some ways, Wolfenstein feels more restrictive, and while we still know nothing about the plot, it seems likely that Somerville will directly adapt the stories of New Order and New Colossus. But that doesn’t make the show any less interesting to Nolan, who grew up in England and was always fascinated by WWII and the rapid technological advancements that defined that era.
“With Wolfenstein, you have this period of incredible — beyond everything else that’s happening, the world is moving,” he says. “It kind of feels like we are right now, but even more so, just at fast forward the whole time. If you look at the world before the Second World War and the world afterwards, the rate of change is staggering.”
Bethesda’s Wolfenstein games capture this through the hypothetical technologies the Nazis develop in the aftermath of their victory, which transforms the world with a retro-futuristic dieselpunk aesthetic. It’s not unlike Fallout, which imagines a future inspired by the look and feel of Cold War era American culture and politics. Both video game franchises also share one more thing in common: they offer a glimpse into an alternate reality where the democratic order we take for granted has slipped away.
Or as Nolan puts it: “All of these stories, sadly, feel quite relevant now, for different reasons.”
