Walton Goggins just wants to be left alone, until he doesn’t

Walton Goggins is ready to talk but, at the same time, he does not want to be disturbed. “Thomas, this is going to be great. I’m excited, really I am. I just need to figure out these damn notifications.”

On Zoom, I watch silently as Goggins tinkers with his laptop, which he has set up in the entrance to his temporary LA home. I ask about the art that decorates the walls behind him, which has made me conscious of my sparse white office backdrop.

“This is my buddy’s place,” he says by way of explanation. “Sorry, I’ve set everything to Do Not Disturb, but these emails and messages keep finding a way through. We can’t have that while we chat.”

After a few minutes, the issue is resolved, and Goggins reappears on screen, undisturbed, wearing a grey woollen pullover with a neckline so deep you can see his bare chest draped in a gold chain.

“OK, let’s f---ing do this,” he says, rearranging his tortoiseshell glasses and running a hand through his signature hair, which is signature messy. “No one is getting through.”

“I’ve played a lot of loners, people seeking connection, trying to step out of the life they were born into.”Credit: Photo: Sinna Nasseri; Styling: Ermahn Ospina for Exclusive Artists

Relentless noise from the outside world is an occupational hazard for any successful actor. It’s especially difficult to avoid when you’re on a year-long winning streak capped off by a career-best performance in The White Lotus, one that has catapulted Goggins into the centre of the cultural conversation. “You get a show like The White Lotus, and there’s no rule book; you just have to white-knuckle it,” Goggins says.

Having swapped his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, for the bright lights of Hollywood when he was 19, Goggins, now 53, is the opposite of an overnight success. He’s had high-profile stints on long-running TV shows, including The Shield, Sons of Anarchy and Justified, as well as roles in two Quentin Tarantino films, Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015).

But there’s something of a Goggins infatuation happening right now.

In the last 12 months, he has nabbed a leading role in Fallout, the big-budget TV series based on a best-selling video game, which became the second-most-watched original in Amazon Prime Video’s history when it premiered last April. Then came a return to The Righteous Gemstones, Danny McBride’s cult comedy about scheming televangelists (the fourth season is currently airing on Max) and now, of course, HBO’s The White Lotus.

Walton Goggins struggled with the process of filming The White Lotus, which saw the cast and crew ensconced for seven months in Thailand.Credit: Photo: Sinna Nasseri; Styling: Ermahn Ospina for Exclusive Artists

If ever an actor seemed purpose-built to be a part of the third iteration of creator Mike White’s holiday-from-hell series, it’s Goggins. With wild eyes and a devilish grin, he is a seamless addition to the show’s cast of morally dubious resort guests at the eponymous White Lotus luxury hotel, this time in Thailand.

Goggins plays Rick Hatchett, a sardonic, downtrodden character out for revenge for whom the phrase “man with a shady past” seems invented to describe. Along for the ride is his star-sign obsessed girlfriend, Chelsea, played by Aimee Lou Wood. The odd couple have become fan favourites.

We speak a week ahead of the show’s finale (which will air here on Binge and HBO Max on Monday) when viewers will finally discover if their theories about who lives and dies were on the money.

Goggins is tight-lipped on Rick’s fate, but despite knowing what happens, he feels anxious all the same. “We spent seven months shooting, and I was anxious every day,” he says. “Rick is a mess, and on the first day of filming, arriving at Koh Samui via boat, the other cast were over the moon, but I had to lock myself in that headspace and stay there.”

Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins) in The White Lotus.

Goggins concedes that of all his creations, Rick has been the hardest to shake. “I’ve been able to step away from it, but it’s just such a significant experience for me and exacerbated by these weekly episodes and all the conversations that swirl around it.”

In conversation, Goggins shows no remnants of his White Lotus alter ego. Where Rick seems to sport a perpetual frown, Goggins often smiles, his brilliant white teeth dazzling, even via Zoom.

Playing a character who detests everyone and everything is never easy, though working in Goggins’ favour was the claustrophobic nature of the shoot. For seven months between February and August in 2024, the cast would talk, eat, sleep, work and hang out together – like a school camp for famous people.

Walton Goggins (Rick) and his long-time friend Sam Rockwell (Frank).

“Honestly, man, outside of my family, there is no one I want to see every day, so there were moments where I couldn’t physically fathom leaving my room,” says Goggins.

“So I would just go AWOL and disappear for a bit; it wasn’t easy as a job. Aimee would check in [on me], and the rest of the cast and crew were terrific, but I didn’t have it in me to blend socialising and working that much. I had a rule: I needed two hours alone for every hour with people, so it was quite an isolating experience.”

Yet Goggins is no stranger to isolation. In the past year and a half, he’s spent “six, maybe seven” weeks at home with his wife, screenwriter Nadia Conners, and their 14-year-old son, Augustus. The trio lives in Hudson Valley in upstate New York, on a sprawling 8000-square-foot property built in 1924 in the style of a Scottish hunting lodge.

It’s the type of house designed to grace the pages of Architectural Digest (and it did in the magazine’s March issue), all repurposed materials, charming antiques, and a prohibition-era bar. Words can’t do the property justice, but this comment on the YouTube video of Architectural Digest’s house tour sums it up: “This house is literally the epitome of his personality.”

Goggins admits he wants to “spend every waking moment there”, but right now, he’s staying at a friend’s house in Los Feliz, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles, while shooting season 2 of Fallout. “It’s a nice place, and I’m so grateful; my wife and son come out here all the time,” he says.

Logistically, relocating to Los Angeles is much easier than spending half a year in Thailand, but it wasn’t only the distance that plagued him during The White Lotus production.

Walton Goggins as “the Ghoul” in Fallout.Credit: Prime Video

In 2004, Goggins’ first wife, Leanne Knight, died by suicide. In the months following, he travelled extensively to try and process his grief, visiting India, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Returning to Bangkok 20 years after his first visit meant confronting a personal trauma he had long since packed away.

“I didn’t anticipate the degree to which it would affect me personally on the way there,” he says. “But then I stepped off the plane and thought, I know this airport, I’ve been here before, and it’s an uneasy feeling when the past creeps into the present.”

The shadow of his previous visit never dissipated – “it stayed the whole time” – but the work proved a handy distraction, and so too did the presence of his friend of 15 years, Sam Rockwell.

Walton Goggins (centre) in The Unicorn.Credit: CBS Studios

There was something of a collective gasp when Rockwell, whose White Lotus casting was kept secret, appeared on-screen alongside Goggins in episode 5. In one of the highlight moments of the season, Rockwell, whose long-time partner is co-star Leslie Bibb (who plays Kate Bohr), delivered a monologue about sexual identity that left Goggins’ character visibly mystified.

The scene has already become part of White Lotus lore, not to mention immortalised as a meme. “We chose not to rehearse it because I wanted those reactions to feel real,” Goggins says. It turned out to be a wise decision. “The night it went to air, my phone started pinging like crazy, and then Sam texted me something like: ‘Are you seeing this shit? The people love Rick and Frank, baby!’”

Universal love for Goggins’ characters, even the most complicated ones, is nothing new. In 2010, he was cast as Boyd Crowder, a reformed white supremacist with a violent streak, in the Western crime series Justified. Boyd was only meant to appear in the pilot, but producers upgraded Goggins to a series regular after test audiences raved about his performance.

It’s a trick that has held him in good stead. Whether playing a Christian con man on Righteous Gemstones or a murderous (and noseless) bounty hunter on Fallout, Goggins has a knack for repurposing eccentricity into something more relatable.

Walton Goggins swims at his temporary home in LA while he is filming Fallout.Credit: Photo: Sinna Nasseri; Styling: Ermahn Ospina for Exclusive Artists

“I can make you love a misunderstood outsider, that’s for sure,” laughs Goggins. “I’ve played a lot of loners, people seeking connection, trying to step out of the life they were born into.”

His on-screen affinity with outsiders is no accident; the result of a colourful childhood populated with unexpected guests from all walks of life.

Goggins’ parents split when he was three, and he was raised mainly by his mother, Janet, who worked long hours as a public servant, helping to find jobs for unemployed people. Stepping in to help was a makeshift village of neighbours, aunties and whoever else was on the scene.

“You never knew who would be around our house; my mum loved to pick up hitchhikers and talk to anyone who looked interesting,” he says. “I remember we met this guy at a convenience store on Christmas Day, and he didn’t have anywhere to be, so he spent it with us.”

Picturing a young Walton Goggins surrounded by hitchhikers in the family kitchen makes a lot of sense when considering the finished product. The perfect environment for a gifted character actor in training. “It’s baked deep into my DNA, man,” sighs Goggins. “A desire to understand all sorts of people because that’s how I was raised.”

Yet when his son Augustus came along, and it was Goggins’ turn to do the raising, he opted for a different approach. “Chaos is fun, and I don’t want to throw the people in my family under the bus, but sometimes you have to remember the fiduciary responsibilities of being a parent, you know, pick your kid up from school or take them to the dentist.”

Fortunately for Augustus, his father has far more exciting plans than a trip to the dentist in the works. When Fallout wraps, a four-week family holiday to Europe is locked away, followed by a two-week father-son trip that feels incredibly on-brand for Goggins.

“We are going horseback riding across western Mongolia because he and I are both obsessed with Genghis Khan,” he says, smiling the crazed smile of a man genuinely excited to spend two weeks in a saddle. “I gave him a book about Genghis Khan when he was 12, and he’s read that, and subsequently five other books, so he has far outpaced my understanding of that part of the world, and I am excited to go and learn from him.

Outside of riding horses, Goggins doesn’t have much of a plan; he’s more of a free-wheeler when it comes to travelling. “All I know is we’ll get lost in the wilderness, take a bunch of books and sleep out under the stars, just me and my boy.”

A “Do Not Disturb” holiday for a man in demand.

The final episode of The White Lotus airs on Max and Binge on Monday.