Frances Turner Is Dropping A Bombshell
Fallout’s most mysterious — and misunderstood — character finally tells her side of the story.
The Wasteland of Fallout is chock-full of untrustworthy figures — outlaws, murderers, and radioactive ghouls — but to hear most fans tell it, few are shadier than Barb Howard (Frances Turner).
The wife of movie star Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) and the specter that haunts his pre-war flashbacks, Barb’s character has been revealed at a maddening pace across Fallout’s two seasons. That she was seemingly the mastermind behind Vault-Tec’s nuclear armageddon was the series’ most gut-twisting bombshell in Season 1... but nothing is ever as it seems in this war-torn world, and Season 2 pulls the curtain back on Barb in a majorly satisfying way.
The latest episode of Fallout reveals that Barb is but a cog in the Vault-Tec machine. Though she suggested that the world’s most powerful corporations drop bombs across the world to drive people into vaults, it wasn’t originally her idea. Barb was coerced by Dr. Siggi Wilzig (Michael Emerson), a kindly scientist beheaded by Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) in Season 1. Why he asks this of Barb is still a mystery, but it goes a long way in clearing her name. It’s particularly cathartic for Turner, who’s been relatively mum on Barb’s shifting moral compass for years.
“They took the wife/mother archetype and turned it on its head.”
“I am so happy we are getting to learn more about Barb and her complexity, her nuances, her humanity,” Turner tells Inverse. “She wasn’t lying when she said she was trying to protect her family.”
Protecting Cooper and their young daughter has always been the priority for Barb, but that truth felt impossible to discern with the focus always on other characters. In Season 2 Episode 6, Fallout finally lets Barb tell her side of the story — at least a bit of it — and in an interview with Inverse, Turner sits down to unpack the show’s most misunderstood character.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
After two years, we’re finally at this moment of vindication for Barb, especially in the conversation that surrounds the show. How satisfying has it been to prove her “innocence,” so to speak?
I’m not going to lie to you — I am so happy we are getting to learn more about Barb and her complexity, her nuances, her humanity. All of those parts of her are being explored, and the audience will see them. I didn’t talk about Barb after Season 1 because I wanted people to live with the reveals and form their own opinions. So I’m really curious about where the conversation goes with her.
Like every other character in the show — with maybe the exception of Lucy, because Lucy was basically incubated in a do-gooder vault — but most of the other characters are not all good or all bad. I don’t think that Ghoul is a good guy, but I understand that the Ghoul has his own moral code based on the life that he’s lived. He’s making decisions based on what he’s experienced and what he knows of the world around him. Barb is the same way. She’s existing in 2077 pre-war America, just like every other American. They all know there’s a resource war happening. Bombs can drop at any time. I mean, you saw the hysteria with the drill with Coop and Janey. And that was just a test.
Barb is existing in that, but by nature of her career, she actually knows that it’s inevitable. She knows more than the average person. It’s not black or white at this point, [but] we can now safely say she wasn’t lying when she said she was trying to protect her family, and that’s her goal. She was navigating this system to protect her family and get them into one of the good vaults. All we can hope for is the best scenario out of all of the worst-case scenarios.
Turner knew as much about Barb as the audience did.
You mentioned not wanting to speak on Barb’s journey between Seasons 1 and 2. How much of her story did you know back then?
Barb was unfolded to me for Season 1 the same way she was unfolded to the audience. When we started filming, I had no idea where she was going. I didn’t even know that she worked at Vault-Tec… Then, when I got the script for the Season 1 finale, I got to Barb’s “...by dropping the bombs ourselves.” As the actor, that’s really exciting. They took the wife/mother archetype and turned it on its head. I knew in Fallout fashion, there were going to be more twists and more reveals. But it wasn’t until we got into actually Episode 3, the scene where Barbara’s packing the keepsake box and she’s very emotional, packing things through tears. Normally, I’ll read the material and instinctually, I’ll feel things. But why she was crying was not yet activated for me. That’s when I had real questions: What does she know? What is her participation? What is beneath these tears?
“She knows what’s coming: complete destruction.”
Barb, I would say, is one of the few characters… informed by things that have happened before, but that the audience won’t see until later. So at a certain point, I had to ask. I needed to know what we’re going to learn later, because it’s informing what’s happening in this moment. That’s when Geneva [Robertson-Dworet], one of our fabulous showrunners, pulled me aside and started to tell me about what happens in Episode 6. She told me about Barb’s day-in-the-life at Vault-Tec, the series of meetings. As she’s telling me, I start getting emotional thinking about what it feels like to see a 5 megaton [nuclear] blast and know that that’s going to happen, and you can’t tell anybody.
That was enough to activate me. Now I know when she’s coming into this moment of packing all of their things, it’s not only sadness that we have to go to this Vault and that Janey’s not going to have all of her things... It’s actually fear. It’s fear, because she knows what’s coming: complete destruction.
Barb knows more than anyone in Fallout’s pre-War plot... which can be taxing.
Barb is a really good litmus test for people’s internal biases. I was reading this very aghast Reddit post that asked, “What does Cooper see in Barb?” It just made me laugh, because they were making Cooper out to be this saint that’s getting taken advantage of. But Cooper’s not innocent.
He’s not innocent. And pre-war Coop is also kind of like... One of the reasons they love each other, and why their marriage works, is that they respect each other for their gifts. He loves that she’s smart and he trusts her to make certain decisions. He trusts her to do the right thing. He knows who he married. In my backstory of them, I used to say that, in a world where Cooper Howard, the actor, walked into a room and everyone swooned over him, Barb was probably the one that didn’t. And that’s intriguing and attractive. She’s not easily impressed by him. She respects him. She respects what he’s built for himself, but she was not fangirling over him in that way. I think that’s a big reason why they work.
“It’s a kind of real, rooted love that makes a person stay alive for 219 years.”
But I also think they’re different people in the sense that Barb experienced her husband go to war… You don’t know when you’re going to get that call. And war never changes. Before we even meet Coop and Barb, they have been living in a state of war for quite some time. I think for him, he’s the movie star, they have a great life. But come on. He thinks driving to Bakersfield, two hours away, is the answer [to avoid nuclear fallout]... Coop has got his head in his own clouds. Of course, she’s not going to tell him, “This is what Vault-Tec’s planning. And I was threatened in an elevator.”
She even says in this episode to Cooper: “I know more than you.” That trickles into every choice she makes, but he still has his autonomy. He’s not being strong-armed or manipulated.
No, not at all. I always had the sense that she was protecting Cooper from getting too close to something, because she knows her husband. She knows he would want to try to be the hero. And that’s very honorable, but that’s not the thing that’s going to help them in this situation. The state of the world around them and what she knows has kind of infected their marriage at a point… [But] they are equals. I say they are grown: they are two grown people in a marriage, and it’s a kind of real, rooted love that makes a person stay alive for 219 years.
Cooper and Barb approach espionage differently, but they need each other to survive New Vegas.
I also love that Episode 6 shows that they need each other. Sure, Coop captures Hank, he gets the briefcase, but he opens the briefcase and…
He doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know what to do with it. Barb knows.
It takes the two of them to get the cold fusion device.
And there’s still more questions and answers we get that raise new questions, which is the fun of it. But we do see that they need each other. And you do see that when push comes to shove, in that moment, they’re a unit. The state of the world around them doesn’t come between that unit.
There are more twists ahead, “and the writers will continue to surprise us all.”
It’s equally gratifying as a Black woman watching such a nuanced Black character on-screen: someone who could be the villain but isn’t, because it’s more complicated than that. The writers give Barb so much grace and build her out with so much patience.
It’s really refreshing that even I, a Black woman, am Barb, right? To see a three-dimensional woman on screen making these choices, navigating this fine line between right and wrong… What is even right in this world of the show? What is wrong? Is she doing the right thing for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right reasons? And really reflecting that back to the audience like, “What would you do in this situation?” We can all say theoretically what we think we would do, but you don’t know until, God forbid, you’re faced with something like that. To have that level of complexity and to have her swing in the directions that she swung and will continue to swing, and to have her played by a Black woman… we don’t get to see that often.
I just want to continue to do more of that. Because again, the complexity of womanhood, those are the Black women I know. I don’t know Black women who occupy the space of the Black Best Friend or just The Boss without any complexity to them. I want to play complex women who are centered in their own story. And that’s the fun of Barb. You think she’s this wife, mother, and then slowly it unfolds where, oh, she’s got her own story going on here. It’s a story that just keeps unfolding like a glass of red wine… and the writers will continue to surprise us all.
