“I’m taking an intellectual detour,” says Lisa Joy, after we discuss digital-protection laws and the new Princess Peach video game but before we go deep on German nationalism. I’m at the Manhattan apartment of Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the husband-wife duo behind trippy sci-fi hits like Westworld, The Peripheral, and Fallout. (Nolan also cowrote Interstellar and the Christian Bale–led Dark Knight films with his brother Christopher.) “I also might sound like a lunatic,” she warns. Nolan quips, “Our work’s been out there for a while. People know.”
Here’s the thing: My entire ninety-minute conversation with Joy, forty-seven, and Nolan, forty-eight, is an intellectual detour—and that’s exactly why they’re two of the most original storytellers in Hollywood right now. They dare to take on the big subjects. (This particular curveball: “Our very notion of what a genius looks like has been shaped by the people in power to define it—and then anoint themselves geniuses.”)
Nolan and Joy’s brainy-weirdo-existentialist superpowers are on full display in Prime Video’s Fallout, which tasked them with overcoming the notoriously insurmountable video-game-adaptation curse. (See: Prince of Persia, Rampage, Max Payne.) They spun the long-running franchise—which imagines an alternate reality where there was a nuclear apocalypse after World War II—into a surprisingly hilarious road trip through hell. A few weeks after we speak, the series will pick up seventeen primetime-Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, the latter for Walton Goggins’s noseless Ghoul. Season 2, per Nolan, will go “deeper, darker into all the nooks and crannies where the games go.”
So how’d they do it? Along with employing the talents of Goggins, Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), and the legendary Kyle MacLachlan, Joy and Nolan also made the brazen decision not to adapt the source material. Not fully, at least. Rather, Fallout is an original story told in the canonical Fallout universe. Risky! Fans rarely love having their alternate universes tinkered with, after all.
But loyalists have fallen in love with the series, celebrating Fallout for the way it evokes the feeling of gameplay. “You know Aaron’s character, Max?” Nolan asks. He’s referring to Aaron Moten’s conflicted soldier, who faces a truly anxiety-racking number of moral conundrums during season 1. “He’s like the player. Which decision are you making?” He summarizes the effect: “It’s a little more like us, right?” Given how well it works—and all those nominations—I suspect this may be Hollywood’s chosen path going forward.
As for what worlds the pair will create next, they’re cagey about details. Joy is “dabbling in writing a horror movie.” And Nolan says he wants to make a space opera. I wonder aloud if Todd Howard will be handing over the keys to the entire Bethesda library, which, along with the Fallout games, also includes power titles Skyrim and Starfield. They steer the conversation elsewhere. So let’s explore a more mundane topic: What’s it like working with the person you’re married to? “I feel like killing him,” Joy says, laughing. “No. I feel like no one is harder on me,” she adds, “and vice versa.” Nolan is just as truthful: “If you’re working together, joined at the hip, your peaks are higher. Your valleys are lower.”
As well as creative partners and spouses of fifteen years, Joy and Nolan are also parents to two elementary-school-age children—a daughter and a son—who both kindly joined the welcome brigade when I arrived before heading upstairs to rack up Sparklas in Princess Peach. “You’re the celebrity of the day,” Joy quips. “There’s gonna be a lot of talk about this.”
The creative genes are already on display in the next generation, Joy soon reveals. “While we’re driving the car, sometimes we record ourselves and pitch ideas. Our children used to ignore us. Now she’s pitching from the backseat,” says Joy about their daughter. Nolan laughs, adding, “We’re in real trouble.... She called the Interstellar twist in the first fifteen minutes.”
If you want to see Joy and Nolan light up, mention Westworld. The pair cocreated the Emmy-winning HBO production, which ran for four seasons before being canceled in 2022. And while they say they aren’t actively looking for a new home for the show, they’ve clearly put a lot of thought into what would have happened in season 5. “It was always going to be a story in which these immortal characters would change and we’d find them in very different circumstances,” says Nolan. Cryptically, Joy adds, “We always had a plan on where to go with it. Time is a gift. Our ideas will change and grow. I’m curious to see when it happens—if it happens—how it’s changed, or how it’s evolved.”
While we’re talking Westworld, I have a confession to make. During the most delirious moments of our shared Covid-19 mandated quarantine, I was Esquire’s Westworld episode recapper. Brain orbs? Android heaven? Robot James Marsden who just won’t die? That was my pandemic. Across the weekly installments, I worked up a bit in which I was losing my mind in unison with Westworld’s increasingly batshit plot. (It works, I promise.) At one point, I asked Esquire’s readers, straight up, if Joy was simply fucking with me.
Lo and behold, I got an email. Not from a reader but from Joy. I won’t reveal the contents of her letter completely, but she may or may not have said she was, in fact, fucking with me and asked if I’d ever questioned the nature of my own reality. “I remember emailing you!” she says when I mention it now. “It’s funny, because I’ve never done that before. Or since. I just remember being like, ‘Can we just have some fun for one second?’” Yes, some detours are allowed to be fun.
Photographed by Mark Seliger
Styled by Chloe Hartstein
Hair by Kevin Ryan using GO247 & UNITE
Grooming by Jessica Ortiz for La Mer
Makeup by Rebecca Restrepo using Lisa Eldridge Beauty
Production by Madi Overstreet and Ruth Levy
Set Design by Michael Sturgeon
Nails by Eri Handa using Dior
Tailoring by Yana Galbshtein
Design Director Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director James Morris
Executive Producer, Video Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment Randi Peck
