Abandoned California mall transformed into post-apocalyptic Las Vegas set for Fallout

The sweeping desert landscape of Las Vegas that Lucy (Ella Purnell) and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) explore in Season 2 of “Fallout” was not filmed in Sin City, but an abandoned LA mall.While the first season showed viewers the post-apocalyptic landscape of Los Angeles, following Lucy as she tries to track down her kidnapped father, Season 2 shifts the story to New Vegas.Production designer Howard Cummings told The Hollywood Reporter that the focal point of the season was to capture Las Vegas before the nuclear bombing of 2077, calling it a “retro-futuristic Vegas.”Instead of filming in the real Las Vegas, Cummings used the long-abandoned Valley Plaza Mall, which opened in 1951 and has been dormant for over a decade, and turned it into the small screen New Vegas.The mall’s old Regal Theater building was rebranded as the Gomorrah Hotel and Casino, with the 27-foot Lucky 38 sign standing next to it, which was built by his team on set.“Most people think this is all CG and they just did a greenscreen,” Cummings said, insisting that these were all real practical sets, aside from digital Vegas backdrops.The prewar flashback scenes were filmed first, before the nuclear blast that turned Goggins’ Howard into The Ghoul, before Cummings and his team went back and “trashed” that set.California's top news, sports and entertainment delivered to your inbox every day.

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Never miss a story “All the palm trees look good at the beginning, and then they’re all dead.The brand-new cars [were] rusted and destroyed,”Cummings also shot the Freeside district of New Vegas in an Old West town in Santa Clarita, California, the same location where another show he worked on was shot, HBO’s “Westworld.”The production designer and his team had to re-face the buildings to match them to the buildings from the game, th...