Justin Theroux Doesn’t See ‘Fallout’ Role Mr. House “As The Bad Guy,” Enjoyed “Poking Fun” At Billionaire Tech Class

As Justin Theroux joins Fallout‘s Prime Video series adaptation as the villainous Robert House, viewers are bound to draw some parallels to some of today’s tech billionaires.

For the 2x Emmy-winning actor, he told Deadline that “was sort of the fun” in bringing the video game character to life on Season 2 of the hit show, which premiered on Wednesday with new episodes dropping weekly at 12am PT.

“I don’t really think of him as the bad guy,” he explained. “I had fun poking fun at that kind of billionaire tech class. At least internally, that was sort of the fun of playing this character.”

Theroux continued, “Because there’s obviously so many sort of parallels, I guess, that you could draw between him and other people or other sort of more analog people like Howard Hughes or whatever, but I sort of saw him as just this incredibly nerdy, slightly heartless guy who believed in his technology, and believed in his right to sort of reorganize the world in the image that he wanted it to be. So, it was just fun.”

In the Season 2 premiere ‘The Innovator’, Theroux debuts as Mr. House eavesdropping on a heated conversation at a blue collar bar in pre-apocalyptic 2077, where some regulars are criticizing a TV interview with House’s public decoy (Rafi Silver). What follows is a grisly display of Mr. House’s mind-control technology, which becomes the new obsession for his disciple Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) in 2296 throughout the sophomore season.

With both timelines on the verge of war, Theroux admitted the topical aspect “absolutely appealed to me, in the way that it felt like sort of a safe way to—the same with the nuclear apocalypse—it feels like a safe way to explore those concepts, those ideas and those ramifications without it being a direct parallel.”

Theroux added, “But as far as it relates to House, I do marvel at the sort of technocrats and the billionaire class. They really are taking just some enormous liberties with what we as a population want or need. And we’re getting things that they want, that we didn’t necessarily ask for, and that could be AI, that could be social media, that could be weaponry. And so, without getting too deep about it, that feels like Mr. House is sort of the receptacle for a lot of those personalities.”