Fallout: Justin Theroux's Character Is Season 2's Wild Card and May Not Be Who You Think He Is

Warning: This article will include spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of Fallout. If you don't want 'em, then you should probably close this tab.

While it was certainly fun to catch up with our dear pals Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) and Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) in the Season 2 premiere of Fallout, the most intriguing part of the episode might actually have been a completely new thread featuring a completely new character: Whoever the heck Justin Theroux is playing.

Theroux's character only has one scene in the season premiere — the opening scene — but it's a real doozy. In it, a group of workmen are hanging out in a bar watching TV, where RobCo founder Mr. House (Rafi Silver) is offering to help the U.S. government calm its tensions with China. One of the men scoffs and calls Mr. House a scumbag, and then Theroux's character chimes in from the back of the room.

The man, who's wearing a crisp suit and sporting the same sort of mustache Mr. House has, goads the men into going into a back alley with him, where he pretends to offer them money in exchange for being test subjects — he attaches what seems to be some sort of mind control device to the back of one man's head, and orders him to murder his friends. Which he does. And then the fancy suit man ends the test by making the guy's head explode, possibly due to a technical error... or maybe not. 

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Who is Justin Theroux actually playing on Fallout?

The man in the suit never identified himself specifically, but he offered two clues: He claims to be Mr. House's biggest fan, and he mentions the H&H Nail Gun. We'll come back to that in a moment.

Since Theroux was cast, he's been expected to play Mr. House, one of the main characters from the Fallout: New Vegas game — with the character presumably being recast after Silver briefly played the part in Season 1. But now, in Season 2, Silver is still playing Mr. House — Silver appears on the TV as Robert House and is listed as Robert House in the credits, but Theroux's character name is not listed at all. So where does that leave us?

One possibility is that Theroux is playing the real Mr. House, with Silver playing a double who serves as the public face of RobCo, the megacorporation Mr. House owns. There's just one problem with that idea, however. The show's creators have said that the TV series, which takes place after the events of the game, won't pick any of the endings of the New Vegas game as being canonical — and since Mr. House ends up very dead in a lot of those potential endings, it would be difficult to justify having him pop up as a major character in the post-apocalypse part of the TV show.

But there's actually a way for Theroux to still be playing Mr. House — just not that Mr. House. Because the Mr. House from the game had a brother.

In New Vegas, players can explore an old H&H Tools factory that's been filled to the brim with automated turrets and other deadly traps. The place had been left that way 200 years earlier, just before the bombs fell, by Robert House's estranged half-brother Anthony. According to the game, Anthony and Robert's father owned H&H Tools, and the two half-brothers each inherited a share when their parents died in an accident. Robert claims Anthony cheated him out of his half of H&H, claiming sole ownership — and it was that incident that sparked Robert to found RobCo, after which he became much more famous and successful than Anthony ever was. And that made Anthony go a little mad. Suffice to say the quip about being Mr. House's biggest fan was undoubtedly sarcastic, if indeed he's supposed to be Anthony. 

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Decades later, a couple months before the bombs fell, an increasingly paranoid Anthony filled up the Vegas H&H factory with traps in response to fears that RobCo was attempting a hostile takeover of H&H Tools, but there's no sign of his body in the factory, and no indication that Anthony died there or anywhere else. So it's more than possible, given how many pre-war folks the Fallout series has already brought into the present-day narrative, that Anthony is still around. And since there aren't any references to him outside that factory and in Robert House's automated obituary, Anthony would be a big blank slate the show's writers can use.

One potential problem with this theory is that the marketing for Season 2 has shown Justin Theroux in the sorts of scenes you'd expect Robert House to be in, not his brother — like in the control room at the top of the Lucky 38 casino. But with two different Mr. Houses showing up in the same scene in this Season 2 premiere, there's clearly some kind of twist coming. 

So what's this Mr. House, whoever he may be, up to on this show? It's too early to say what his goal is specifically, but it looks like he's aligned with Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan), who took a spin through Vault 24 to see about that mind control device from the opening scene — apparently that device was part of Vault 24's experiments in brainwashing. Hank arrived at an underground Vault-Tec office facility at the end of the episode and seemingly tried to make contact with Theroux's character. So whatever they're up to has been in the works for a long time, and it's looking like Hank may have been a mole within Vault-Tec the entire time.

Fallout Season 2 streams new episodes Wednesdays on Prime Video.