brought

This story contains spoilers for the fifth episode of “Fallout” Season 2.

On a sunny afternoon in late February 2025, members of the “Fallout” crew are setting up a suspended rig along a dusty road on their Santa Clarita set that will be used to film a scene where Walton Goggins’ character — a long-lived mutated survivor of the nuclear apocalypse known simply as the Ghoul — will get punched out a window.

A short walk away on an indoor stage, Ella Purnell and Kyle MacLachlan have been filming their characters’ long-anticipated reunion. The cameras are on Purnell’s Lucy MacLean, a sheltered former Vault dweller who’s traveled from the California coast to New Vegas in pursuit of her father.

“My little Sugarbomb,” says MacLachlan as Hank MacLean to a woozy Lucy just before she passes out. Among those observing the takes on the monitors are “Fallout” showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.

Both moments take place within the final minutes of “The Wrangler,” the fifth episode of the Prime Video series’ second season, which sees Lucy and the Ghoul finally make their way through the streets of the post-apocalyptic remnants of Sin City after trekking through the Mojave Desert together.

An adaptation of the popular video game franchise, “Fallout” is set in an alternate future around 200 years after much of the world was decimated by nuclear bombs. Some Americans, including Lucy’s father Hank, survived by moving into a network of underground bunkers called Vaults, while others were left to fend for themselves in the Wasteland.

In a flashback, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) visits Las Vegas in “Fallout” Season 2.

(Lorenzo Sisti / Prime Video)

Unlike many of the locations featured in the series so far, New Vegas is one that fans of the franchise are very familiar with because it’s the setting of the 2010 game “Fallout: New Vegas.”

Although incorporating such an iconic setting came with its own challenges, the allure of taking the story to New Vegas was too irresistible for the show’s creative team.

“When Lucy left the Vault, she was very innocent, very naive,” says Robertson-Dworet. By the end of the first season, “she’s had a couple of weeks in the Wasteland and she’s certainly had her eyes opened a fair amount. But she is on a journey to follow her father and uncover even darker secrets. So the idea of taking her to the actual City of Sin was incredibly appealing at a metaphorical or character level.”

Audiences have seen how Lucy’s time on the surface world has been affecting her. And her first day in New Vegas has been a doozy: She encountered terrifying mutated reptilian creatures known as Deathclaws, has been dealing with a drug addiction, committed some theft and even killed a man.

“As we get closer to Vegas … you really start to get to see how much [the Ghoul has] rubbed off on her,” executive producer Jonathan Nolan says. “That fundamental question of ‘Is she willing to to break some of the same rules that he is?’ is one of the driving questions of the narrative. How far is too far and … how many of her carefully fostered beliefs … will survive the journey through the Wasteland?”

The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) sitting alone inside the Atomic Wrangler Hotel room in “Fallout.”

(Prime Video)

Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard, who serves as an executive producer of the “Fallout” series, acknowledges that bringing New Vegas into the show for Season 2 added “an element of difficulty above and beyond that of Season 1.”

“It’s exciting because you’re going to an iconic ‘Fallout’ location, but it’s also tricky because players know it,” Howard explains. “It’s easier, creatively, to go someplace [players] don’t know, but to take the show to a place that they know and love so much, you really have to be extra careful.”

The dilemma for the show’s creative team involved the balance between video game accuracy and the realities of building practical sets. While using a digital background would enable the show to recreate the precise geography of the games, the team’s aim is to try to build and use as many real sets, props and effects as possible.

“Our feeling was always … that we can make it more cinematic, more tactile, if we actually build [New Vegas],” Robertson-Dworet says. “The trade off is going to be [that] maybe we are not going to get it right down to the pixel the way fans remember it. [But] the level of commitment to the games and [to] honoring the games as much as we possibly can is very real.”

Understandably, the “Fallout” crew was not able to build an entire city from the ground up. So instead of incorporating every building on the New Vegas map, they aimed to include some favorites along with ones that best served the story.

The “Fallout” cast and crew on the Freeside set in Santa Clarita.

(Lorenzo Sisti/Prime Video)

Freeside, which is the district that exists in the remnants of Las Vegas’ Fremont Street, was built on a lot in Santa Clarita previously used by shows like “Westworld” and “Deadwood,” while a defunct shopping mall was transformed into the New Vegas Strip.

“Because I’m dealing with real buildings that exist in the real world, it’s not laid out exactly the same as it is in the game,” says Howard Cummings, the show’s production designer. “I put some greatest hits of Freeside, essentially, in a three-block radius on one street. They are laid out progressively similar to the game, but not the [exact] relationship in the actual game.”

One of the focal points in Freeside is the Atomic Wrangler, a multi-story casino and bar with lodging that was featured in “Fallout: New Vegas.”

“The Atomic Wrangler was so specific in the game,” says Cummings. “It has specific architecture and has this terrific neon sign that I love with the cowboy … There’s no way to take [a building that] already existed [on set] and have it look like the Atomic Wrangler … so I put a facade in front of a facade.”

Some of that wizardry went into the interior of the Atomic Wrangler as well. The first floor bar area, for instance, is actually housed in a different building across the dirt street.

“It was the old saloon in ‘Westworld,’” says Cummings, who was also the production designer on Nolan’s sci-fi western that aired for four seasons on HBO. “Turning that into a ‘50s nightclub was really fun. What used to be the stage in the old saloon got shifted to the other side.”

Lucy (Ella Purnell) browses the merchandise in Sonny’s Sundries.

(Prime Video)

The “Fallout” series marks the first television project for Howard, who is known for his work on the “Fallout” and “Elder Scrolls” series of video games. Besides the scale of the production, what has surprised him the most has been just how much the show does utilize practical designs and effects.

“I thought more of it would be fake,” Howard says. But “they really wanted to make everything as practical as possible. … It’s not just the scale of it, but the level of detail and the small things — I was pretty blown away. I thought there’d be more ‘movie magic,’ fakery, but no.”

He recalls visiting the Vault set for the first time during the show’s first season and being amazed that not only had the crew built a full Vault people could walk through, but how even the smallest detail — like a multi-page report on an official’s desk — was fully fabricated.

This attention to detail is apparent within New Vegas as well, from the various goods sold at Sonny’s Sundries (at marked-up prices) to the working monitors of all sizes seen in a certain executive penthouse.

For Nolan, walking onto New Vegas for the first time came with a unique sense of familiarity thanks to having played the games.

“The Germans haven’t come up with a phrase for it yet, but there’s the form of deja vu that you get when you enter a physical version of a space that you’ve come to know virtually,” says Nolan, who explains he felt that sense for the first time when he visited Miami after coming to know the city in a “Grand Theft Auto” video game.

But what he especially delighted in was being able to feature a Deathclaw outside the Strip.

“Fallout” executive producers James Altman, left, and Jonathan Nolan and co-executive producer Noreen O’Toole at the video village.

(Lorenzo Sisti / Prime Video)

“The Deathclaw [is] such a hallmark of that of that game,” says Nolan. “Everyone begins ‘Fallout: New Vegas’ by looking at Vegas and going, ‘Oh, I’ll walk to Vegas.’ The reason you can’t just do that is the Deathclaw, you find that out very quickly, so bringing that to life and spending time on set with the amazing artists of Legacy [Effects] and [Industrial Light & Magic] … was just an extraordinary collaboration.”

While the first season of “Fallout” was filmed in New York (and other locations), the team moved the production to California for Season 2. The move involved disassembling the Vault sets and transporting them across the country in 77 semitrucks to be rebuilt again — this time all connected on one sound stage — in L.A.

Nolan says “Fallout’s” move back to California was “largely for creative reasons” and to reconnect with his former “Westworld” crew members, but he has also been outspoken about the importance of getting Hollywood productions back to California. He even invited state lawmakers on set while filming Season 2 to show them the importance of California’s film and TV tax credit program to reverse the exodus of Hollywood productions.

“We’re hopeful,” says Nolan. “We’re going to keep shooting ‘Fallout’ here. Season 3 [is] heading into production, hopefully, later this year and we’re going to do our part. But hopefully other people will be pushing hard to bring as much production back to California as possible.”

If the Shakers have a lasting cultural legacy, it is their music — most famously “Simple Gifts,” the uplifting spiritual Aaron Copland immortalized in his ballet “Appalachian Spring.” It stands to reason, then, that a film about Ann Lee, the founding “mother” of this 18th century celibate Christian sect, would be a musical. But this was no conventional woman and “The Testament of Ann Lee,” directed by Mona Fastvold and opening in L.A. on Dec. 25, is no ordinary musical.

“Ann Lee was very radical and extreme,” says composer Daniel Blumberg, “and Mona is as well.”

As conceived by Fastvold and Blumberg, the entire tapestry of this film is musicalized — from the emphatic breathing, chest thumping and floor stomping that make up the worshipers’ rituals, to the songs, inspired by Shaker traditionals and performed by star Amanda Seyfried and the cast. Even the sounds of wind, the creaking of ships and a passing cow play a part.

“This cow walks past during the song ‘I Love Mother,’” says Blumberg, 35, visiting L.A. from his native England and speaking from a hotel room over Zoom. Bald with severe features but a soft and guileless disposition, he’s fidgety about the whole Hollywood press dance — this is only his fourth feature film score. But Blumberg is eager to dissect his music-making process and brag about his collaborators. “We were tuning the cows to the song,” he says.

Amanda Seyfried and Lewis Pullman in the movie “The Testament of Ann Lee.”

(Searchlight Pictures)

In a prologue about Lee’s harsh childhood in Manchester, England, her mother hums a tune to her based on the traditional Shaker hymn “Beautiful Treasures.” The melody is then completed on celeste in Blumberg’s score, surrounded by a liturgical choir. The entire film is this kind of holistic musical current: score, songs and environment all in conversation with each other, every component a part of the dance.

“The whole project was very dangerous,” says Blumberg, an indie singer-songwriter with a cult following in the U.K. and now an Oscar for last year’s “The Brutalist.” “It’s always on the edge. And for me that’s a good place to be when you’re making art.”

In one stunning montage, we see a newly married Lee subjugated to religiously-tinged sex (a catalyst for her dogmatic rejection of carnal relations), give birth to several babies, mourn their deaths and express her sorrow in a fervent dance for God. Erotic noises and the cries of childbirth weave together with prayerful moaning and a mother’s keening cries, all integrated into Blumberg’s instrumental score — a guided meditation for bells and strings — with Seyfried singing “Beautiful Treasures.”

“It was very important to me to try and create this hypnotic feel to the film,” says Fastvold, speaking on Zoom from her car during the awards-season whirlwind. “You had to understand it on a sensorial level. Because I think a lot of the appeal, especially early on, were these kinds of endless dance/voice/confession sessions that would last for days.”

“If it’s just someone preaching to you,” she adds, “I certainly can’t connect to that.”

The director, 44, grew up in a secular home in Norway, but her film about this radical American sect is strikingly earnest. Fastvold doesn’t judge Lee’s convictions; there isn’t an ounce of cynicism or condescension. After having a prophetic vision in which Lee is told she is the female incarnation of Jesus Christ, Seyfried sings, “I hunger and thirst / After true righteousness / I hunger and thirst” with utter heart-bleeding sincerity. The camera and the music share her faith completely.

“I never felt like I wanted to laugh at them,” says Fastvold. “I wanted to laugh with them and sometimes their naivete is funny and endearing. But I never wanted to ridicule them. Of course, it’s a very scary thing to try and do.”

When Seyfried read the screenplay two years ago, she experienced some of that intimidation.

“It was definitely the most confused I’ve been in a while reading a script,” she says, nursing a hot tea on Zoom, “because I’m seeing these placeholders for where the hymns will be, when the music comes in, when the diegetic sound goes out or if it doesn’t at all. It was all very foreign to me — which is not necessarily a bad thing. It just leaves me with so many questions.”

Fastvold co-wrote “The Testament of Ann Lee” with her partner, Brady Corbet, who directed “The Brutalist.” They were developing it while working on his breakthrough epic. Blumberg, who has made a number of solo albums and been part of several bands including Cajun Dance Party and Yuck, became friends with Corbet a decade ago. The trio became inseparable.

Fastvold was listening to Blumberg’s records when she decided to direct “The World to Come” in 2020, a warm historical romance about two women in a chilly frontier America. She remembers being captivated by the “beautiful dissonance” in his music. “There’s this mournful, slightly atonal quality to his compositions,” she says.

Fastvold hired Blumberg to score her film — his first — and invited him to the set in Romania to experience the time-traveling feeling of the woods and the sound of passing sheep. She even gave him a small on-screen part, selling a blue dress to Katherine Waterston’s character. It was emblematic of her and Corbet’s then-burgeoning philosophy: of making lavish films on a shoestring, using stunning foreign environments to portray a bygone America and roping crew members and family into the collaboration.

For her ambitious follow-up musical about the Shakers, Fastvold knew she needed Blumberg at the ground level, along with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, a collaboration that required proximity. “We kind of move in together for a while and just start figuring it out,” Fastvold says.

“The whole project was very dangerous,” says Blumberg. “It’s always on the edge. And for me that’s a good place to be when you’re making art.”

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

They discussed how to cast a spell on the audience and how, with cinema, “you’ve got these tools to use,” says Blumberg, “with image, sound, the writing of it all and just to push those as far as possible. Obviously with the edit you can move in time very quickly, and then with sound you can bring people into the room that the characters are in, but also bring them into the heavens. It was trying to use the materials that we had to make an experience — with the story, but inside the story as well. An immersive experience.”

Fastvold and Blumberg immersed themselves in the thousands of songs the Shakers left behind, including hymns and what the group called “gift songs” and “dance songs.”

“What is our dialogue with this tradition and what is it that we’re bringing to this conversation?” Fastvold remembers them asking each other. “Because really that, to me, is what folk music is. It’s passed on, it’s transformed — it turns into something else and then passed on again.”

They found several Shaker songs that fit the needs of given scenes and moments; whenever they couldn’t, Blumberg wrote an original. The Jewish composer recalled the niguns — wordless, improvised prayers — that he grew up hearing in synagogue, and he drew on that sense memory. Many Shaker songs are mantra-like prayers addressed to God, simple rising and falling melodies based on a short repeated phrase. Blumberg got creative with the harmonies, creating demos that he sang himself.

“It was very nerve-racking,” he says, “because score is a moment where you can fix things — you do it after the edit — but this was going to define the pace of the film. There’s quite high stakes of it working.”

Seyfried was nervous too. Even though she’s a trained singer, with film credits including “Mamma Mia!” and “Les Misérables,” this peculiar religious epic required an enormous leap of faith.

“I knew Mona was going to shoot it beautifully,” Seyfried says, “and I knew that Daniel was going to be there every step of the way. And I knew that I was in good hands — but I didn’t know at that point that I could trust myself as a singer, as a musician. It was completely new territory for me. Terrifying.”

The songs were prerecorded for playback on set. The first thing Seyfried recorded in studio was an a cappella song for a scene late in the film — the lyric is “How can I but love my dear faithful children?” She says she felt miserable.

“I was just like: I sound terrible,” Seyfried says sincerely. “This song is not fun to sing. It’s beautiful, but I don’t sound beautiful. I don’t like the way I sound. And we kept doing it and my voice was dry.”

Blumberg patiently worked at finding the most comfortable key for her voice. “I had no idea how lucky I was,” she says.

Amanda Seyfried in the movie “The Testament of Ann Lee.”

(TIFF)

In the process of working with Blumberg, Seyfried says she came to a deeper appreciation of the character as well as her own singing voice. “I was so critical of it,” she remembers, but the role gave her a different kind of freedom. “I was playing somebody who didn’t necessarily have to be a beautifully trained singer,” she says. “She sang because she wanted to feel alive, and she wanted to feel free, and she wanted to feel connected to her faith — and that already just liberates the performer.”

After extensive rehearsals that continued throughout production, Fastvold shot the film in Budapest. Blumberg was always on set, accompanying the actors with a small keyboard. (Thomasin McKenzie and Lewis Pullman are among the cast members who also sing in the film.) Sometimes the actors had a simple click track in an earpiece, other times a “stomp track” from the foot choreography. They would sing live in addition to lip-syncing to playback and Fastvold amassed a huge variety of live tracks — vocals, breaths and other bodily sounds — for her final mix.

“I wanted all of that life and that natural feel to it,” she says, “to not have it feel polished at all, to just be really raw. Because they weren’t singing to entertain. It’s never performative. It’s always from this place of prayer or pain.”

With her principal cast surrounded by Hungarian extras, Fastvold roped everyone, from the dialect coach to the first assistant director’s son to Blumberg’s sister, into the dance.

“If you came to visit, you were in the movie,” she says. “The cast is the crew and the crew is the cast. It’s how I like to do it.” Once again, Daniel Blumberg appears on-screen, in scenes of Shaker worship; he also sings an original duet, “Clothed by the Sun,” with Seyfried under the end credits.

But at this point his work was only half done. Armed with a cut of the film, pillared by the songs he wrote and arranged, Blumberg crafted a score that subtly teed up song melodies and established a sense of spiritual trance. He gravitated toward the sound of bells; he and Fastvold found a handbell from Ann’s era that they used in early demos and he ended up renting some 50 church bells, in different keys, all laid out on the floor of his London flat.

He extended the bell idea with the jangly celeste, also known as a bell piano, and he augmented those bells with a small string ensemble, a choir and, at one point, even an electric guitar.

It was Blumberg’s idea to have two veteran improvising singers, Phil Menton and Maggie Nichols (who also appears in the film), to each record a track where they improvised along to the entire film. Working with mixer Steve Single, Fastvold and Blumberg would occasionally bring up one of these stems and layer it into the rest of the soundtrack for an added color.

“We’d say, ‘Let’s hear what Maggie was doing at this point,’” Blumberg says, “and then we’d bring up her stem and be like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if she follows that character there?’ Or, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if she’s humming outside the window?’ Or if it’s almost like the heavens speaking down on Ann?”

The final result is utterly unique to Blumberg and Fastvold, a period character study by way of trance and an experiential approximation of religious fervor. By exploring a distant and somewhat alien community through the device of music, they somehow tapped into something universal.

One of Blumberg’s favorite moments in the film is a scene where a group of sailors, transporting Lee and her disciples to the new world, shout at the Shakers to stop singing. “They really sound like this out-of-tune rabble, and you hear what maybe other people might have heard,” he says. “And then a few minutes later they’re praying on the ship and I’ve used all these reverbs and there’s all these choirs singing in the background — it’s almost like what they felt from within.”

Like the Shakers and their songs and prized furniture, “Ann Lee” was made with craft and care by a small and familial utopian community of its own.

“There were no notes from film people,” says Blumberg. “It was our bubble. So the only fear was just them trying to release it and everyone going, ‘No, that’s just mad.’ But what I was trying to do from the start was: If I got to something that seemed good, how can I push that further? Like, really trying to push everything to the extreme.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump made dozens of promises when he campaigned to retake the White House last year, from boosting economic growth to banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports.

But one pledge stood out as the most important in many voters’ eyes: Trump said he would not only bring inflation under control, but push grocery and energy prices back down.

“Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again,” he said in 2024. “Your prices are going to come tumbling down, your gasoline is going to come tumbling down, and your heating bills and cooling bills are going to be coming down.”

He hasn’t delivered. Gasoline and eggs are cheaper than they were a year ago, but most other prices are still rising, including groceries and electricity. The Labor Department estimated Thursday that inflation is running at 2.7%, only a little better than the 3% Trump inherited from Joe Biden; electricity was up 6.9%.

And that has given the president a major political problem: Many of the voters who backed him last year are losing faith.

“I voted for Trump in 2024 because he was promising America first … and he was promising a better economy,” Ebyad, a nurse in Texas, said on a Focus Group podcast hosted by Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell. “It feels like all those promises have been broken.”

Since Inauguration Day, the president’s job approval has declined from 52% to 43% in the polling average calculated by statistician Nate Silver. Approval for Trump’s performance on the economy, once one of his strongest points, has sunk even lower to 39%.

That’s dangerous territory for a president who hopes to help his party keep its narrow majority in elections for the House of Representatives next year.

To Republican pollsters and strategists, the reasons for Trump’s slump are clear: He overpromised last year and he’s under-performing now.

“The most important reasons he won in 2024 were his promises to bring inflation down and juice the economy,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said. “That’s the reason he won so many voters who traditionally had supported Democrats, including Hispanics. … But he hasn’t been able to deliver. Inflation has moderated, but it hasn’t gone backward.”

Last week, after deriding complaints about affordability as “a Democrat hoax,” Trump belatedly launched a campaign to convince voters that he’s at work fixing the problem.

But at his first stop, a rally in Pennsylvania, he continued arguing that the economy is already in great shape.

“Our prices are coming down tremendously,” he insisted.

“You’re doing better than you’ve ever done,” he said, implicitly dismissing voters’ concerns.

He urged families to cope with high tariffs by cutting back: “You know, you can give up certain products,” he said. “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls.”

Earlier, in an interview with Politico, Trump was asked what grade he would give the economy. “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” he said.

On Wednesday, the president took another swing at the issue in a nationally televised speech, but his message was basically the same.

“One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead,” he said. “Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. … Inflation is stopped, wages are up, prices are down.”

Republican pollster David Winston, who has advised GOP members of Congress, said the president has more work to do to win back voters who supported him in 2024 but are now disenchanted.

“When families are paying the price for hamburger that they used to pay for steak, there’s a problem, and there’s no sugarcoating it,” he said. “The president’s statements that ‘we have no inflation’ and ‘our groceries are down’ have flown in the face of voters’ reality.”

Another problem for Trump, pollsters said, is that many voters believe his tariffs are pushing prices higher — making the president part of the problem, not part of the solution. A YouGov poll in November found that 77% of voters believe tariffs contribute to inflationary pressures.

Trump’s popularity hasn’t dropped through the floor; he still has the allegiance of his fiercely loyal base. “He is at his lowest point of his second term so far, but he is well within the range of his job approval in the first term,” Ayres noted.

Still, he has lost significant chunks of his support among independent voters, young people and Latinos, three of the “swing voter” groups who put him over the top in 2024.

Inflation isn’t the only issue that has dented his standing.

He promised to lead the economy into “a golden age,” but growth has been uneven. Unemployment rose in November to 4.6%, the highest level in more than four years.

He promised massive tax cuts for the middle class, but most voters say they don’t believe his tax cut bill brought them any benefit. “It’s hard to convince people that they got a tax break when nobody’s tax rates were actually cut,” Ayres noted.

He kept his promise to launch the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history — but many voters complain that he has broken his promise to focus on violent criminals. In Silver’s average, approval of his immigration policies dropped from 52% in January to 45% now.

A Pew Research Center survey in October found that 53% of adults, including 71% of Latinos, think the administration has ordered too many deportations. However, most voters approve of Trump’s measures on border security.

Republican pollsters and strategists say they believe Trump can reverse his downward momentum before November’s congressional election, but it may not be easy.

“You look at what voters care about most, and you offer policies to address those issues,” GOP strategist Alex Conant suggested. “That starts with prices. So you talk about permitting reform, energy prices, AI [artificial intelligence] … and legislation to address healthcare, housing and tax cuts. You could call it the Affordability Act.”

“A laser focus on the economy and the cost of living is job one,” GOP pollster Winston said. “His policies on regulation, energy and taxes should have a positive impact, but the White House needs to emphasize them on a more consistent basis.”

“People voted for change in 2024,” he warned. “If they don’t get it — if inflation doesn’t begin to recede — they may vote for change again in 2026.”