Legendary actor – and one of the most impressive chins in Hollywood – Ron Perlman has narrated nearly every Fallout game since the first RPG released in 1997, and he couldn't care less. It was a decision he made when he was hungry.
"They gave me $40 and a sandwich," Perlman says about agreeing to assist Interplay with Fallout in the '90s in a recent episode of The Joe Vulpis Podcast. "A year-and-a-half later, I get a call, 'Hey, you remember Fallout?' 'No.' 'Well, there's a second one.' I go, 'Why?'"
A stunned Perlman was informed the game – which sold a seriously impressive 100,000 copies by the end of '97 – "went through the fuckin' roof."
"I go, 'Really? Cool,'" he says. "Do the second one, and then, a year later, the third, the fourth… and now, it's like a whole brand. I didn't see that coming."
Perlman has never even played Fallout. He summarizes his time with the game like this: "I did a couple of lines, and, you know, got my $40 and my sandwich and went home." It had been seven years since he'd performed his breakout role as Vincent on the show Beauty and the Beast, and there were still seven more years to go until he'd play the title character in Guillermo del Toro's cult classic Hellboy.
"I'm not a gamer [...], I wouldn't know which game goes into which piece of hardware. I've never played any of the games," he muses, having spent a reasonable chunk of his career acting in a shopping list of AAA games like Call of Duty, Halo 2, Halo 3, and more. Anyway, "this whole Fallout thing is like a mystery to me."
