Walton Goggins is experiencing a level of fame he hasn’t yet dealt with in his 30-year career in Hollywood — and it’s all thanks to The White Lotus.
“It’s like the Super Bowl of culture,” Goggins, 53, told The Observer of the HBO Max anthology series in an interview published on Friday, April 25. In season 3, Goggins played Rick Hatchett, whose story line came to a (spoiler alert) tragic end in the finale, which aired on April 6.
His appearance on Mike White’s “juggernaut,” as Goggins called it, launched him into new heights in the industry, but the actor is just trying to “honor the moment.” As for whether or not he has someone he can talk to about the sudden attention, Goggins mentioned his pal and fellow actor Pedro Pascal — who also had a breakout moment following his roles as Din Djarin in The Mandalorian and Joel Miller in The Last of Us.
“I don’t have those conversations with my friends,” he insisted, adding, “Pedro Pascal is a dear friend of mine, and he’s had this experience for the last two or three years… I suppose he would be the first person I would call, you know. I would have reached out to him if I thought I needed an intervention.”
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Instead, Goggins — who said he enjoys unwinding with a charcuterie board, candles, string lights and music — is trying to bask in the excitement.
“I wake up and I have two cappuccinos and I think about my place in this larger kind of life,” he said, noting that he also likes to work out and always makes time to catch up with his wife, Nadia Conners, and son, Augustus, 14.
Goggins earned attention for playing a corrupt detective on The Shield for seven seasons before co-starring with Timothy Olyphant on Justified from 2010 to 2015. In the past few years, his performance as crooked evangelist Baby Billy in The Righteous Gemstones upped the ante, followed by The White Lotus and now Prime’s Fallout, on which he currently plays The Ghoul/Cooper Howard.
“I’ve seen my friends’ mistakes. I’ve seen the decisions they’ve made, both to be involved in something and then to not be involved with something. But the more opportunities you get to play pretend, the better you become at playing pretend,” Goggins said of taking jobs that might not always appear to be the right move.
His next role comes in The Uninvited, a film written and directed by his wife, Conners. It was inspired by a party the couple threw in real life and also stars Pascal, 50, Elizabeth Reaser and Rufus Sewell.
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When Conners first asked her husband to be involved, he resisted. “I said, I can’t, Nadia … there’s a version of our relationship in there.” But she knew she needed his “neuroses,” and he relented.
“The first night we spent together — after, you know, the first night we spent together — was talking about a movie that she was very close to making. And she came over and we had a glass of wine and we began breaking that story down,” he detailed. “It ultimately didn’t get made. But we do that daily for each other — that’s always been a big part of our relationship. This is just the first time we were paid to work together.”
