The weird and wonderful world of The White Lotus star Walton Goggins

“I don’t know if we come back here again,” Walton Goggins ponders of life on Earth, every bit the philosophical, low-buttoned shirt-wearing dude we have come to love. “I don’t know anything, none of us really do, right? The only thing that we have control over is our participation in the world around us, and I try to lean into those things.”

Leaning in seems to be Goggin’s natural sensibility, but that’s not easy when you’re in the eye of a hurricane. The past 18 months have seen the cult actor hit stratospheric heights, appearing in several huge TV hits; the biggest of all being, of course, pop culture juggernaut, The White Lotus.

“I’m thinking of the right words to describe it …” he says in his familiar Southern drawl, from a hotel room in LA. “Wonderfully chaotic!”

It certainly has been. Mike White’s third series of the millionaires-on-holiday murder mystery was the most tragic so far, with the fateful tale of two lovers at its heart: a lone wolf with abandonment issues, Rick Hatchett (Goggins), and his besotted younger girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). No spoilers, but it ended up as one of the most heartbreaking stories of the season.

The show pulled in an average of 16 million viewers each episode, but fans soon began to turn their feverish attentions to the actors off-screen, especially after cast mate Jason Isaacs talked about the intense filming of the show in Thailand. All the cast lived at the hotel where the show was filmed, for months, and Isaacs said: “Some people got very close, there were friendships that were made and friendships that were lost.” And so ignited much online speculation about the cast, particularly whether an assumed once-close Goggins and Wood had fallen out.

“I’m not going to go too far down this path,” Goggins starts carefully, when I ask about the sudden internet wildfire, “but I will say this, with anything that commands the public’s attention, there will be a lot of scrutiny on it. But with everything in life, it will flow, and it will ebb and people will move on to something else. I’m just grateful so many people were invested emotionally in this story.”

It was almost impossible not to be. Goggins delivered a captivating performance as the troubled man who just couldn’t get the “monkey off his back”; and Wood shone as the cosmic girlfriend who desperately wanted to fix her soulmate. The chemistry between Chelsea and Rick was palpable in the series, and whether or not they got on as people, they were electric on-screen together. Did they work on creating a backstory for the couple’s complicated relationship together?

“A little bit,” Goggins says. “Aimee’s such an incredible actor, she’s such an incredible storyteller. There’s not really a lot of talking that needs to happen, but we talked a little bit about it. You know you’re in safe hands and I think she knew she was in safe hands, and let’s just save it all for when Mike yells, ‘Action’.”

Rick was a role that undoubtedly touched his soul. In a strange turn of events, on the last day of filming in Bangkok with close friend Sam Rockwell — with whom he shared one of the stand-out scenes of the series — Goggins found himself in the exact same spot he had been 18 years earlier, when he had been travelling in the wake of the devastating death of his first wife Leanne Knight.

“I didn’t anticipate pulling up to this dock on a boat and recognising it,” he says, his voice growing lower. “I looked up and I realised exactly where I was and the room that I stayed in at the time. I got out, and I just walked up and looked at that balcony and at this road, and I remembered every step that I took to walk to check in to that hotel 18 years ago.”

What would you say to that Walton back then?

“Do you live in London?” he suddenly asks me. “When did you move to London?” About 20 years ago, I tell him. “So maybe you have the same experience that I have in Los Angeles? I have ghosts of myself on every street in the city. I think, I know that corner and this corner, this is where I was in my life then. And so we’re constantly coming into contact with former versions of ourselves.

“So at that particular point in my life, there was a lot going on. To be where I am in my own life now, and to look up at this guy, I just wanted to hold him and say, ‘Everything’s gonna be alright, man’.”

He watched The White Lotus finale alone — with a whiskey in his hotel room — as he was in New York appearing in a number of chat shows, which is why he didn’t join the rest of the cast in LA. Surprisingly, for one of Hollywood’s most versatile talents, he then admits: “To be quite honest with you, I’ve done that for everything I’ve ever done. I don’t watch a movie that I’ve been in with any other person, certainly for the first time, unless it’s a premiere.

“It’s because it’s an intense, personal experience for me, whether it’s a drama or whether it’s a comedy. And I was there, right? So I really don’t need to ever see any of these things, but if I do choose to see them, I don’t want the people around me to be expected to react in a certain way. Because that’s unfair to them and so I would just rather watch it myself.”

Spoiler alert! Much has been made of the final scene of ill-fated Rick and Chelsea, falling dead into the resort waters after being shot. Was that a… smile on Rick’s face in his final shot?

“Yeah, I think there was,” he confirms. “But I won’t tell you my feelings about it as it’s too personal for me. It’s like when I asked Quentin Tarantino if I’m the sheriff of Red Rock in The Hateful Eight and he said, ‘Only you can decide that, and I don’t want to know the answer to your question.’”

I get the feeling he’s slightly relieved when we move on to other subjects, and he becomes more animated — such as talking about his terrific turn as the flamboyant evangelical pastor, Baby Billy, in Danny McBride’s The Righteous Gemstones. This fourth and final series features Baby Billy in a “Teenjus” musical, in which the 70-year-old character plays a teenage singing and dancing Jesus; Goggins recently posted a brilliantly bonkers behind-the-scenes video to his 1.4 million Instagram followers. Another scene in this series has Baby Billy water-skiing naked.

“All of those scenes have been wild,” he says. “It’s been an extraordinary experience. The Teenjus episode is so outrageous and just so cool, as is the finale.” He’s keeping a couple of mementos from this role, namely a red Yves Saint Laurent top from season four and a Gucci jacket: “The costume designer is a dear friend of mine and I said, ‘Girl, I need to go home with this!’ And she said, ‘Oh you absolutely have to go home with this.’ And then I got an email from HBO saying, ‘You can go home with that, but you got to pay for it!’” He bursts out that famous laugh.

Goggins is clearly a man who goes all guns blazing into every role in his decades-long career. Growing up in Lithia Springs, Georgia, he was taught to approach everything with an open heart by “a very unconventional group of women in the South”: his mum, aunts and grandma who raised him.

“My path was set pretty early by the big thinkers in my life,” he says. “They challenged me from a very early age to look at the world as a beautiful thing and fall madly in love with it, and to explore your own path. They laid out options for me and then planted seeds.” He adds of his wife of 14 years, Nadia Conners, and their 14-year-old son, Augustus: “It’s hopefully what we’re doing with our child.”

Moving to LA when he was 19 — not necessarily to be an actor, he says, more to “see the world and understand the world” — he booked his first job, In the Heat of the Night in 1989. But in his early twenties, it all went rather quiet after a movie that “very few people saw”. Goggins’ story might have ended there. But, he says, “Instead of getting depressed about it, I thought, what do I really want to do anyway? And so I enrolled in a community college and studied philosophy, film and algebra. I did it for about six months and I had a great time doing it.”

Then the casting agents came calling again, and by this point he was level-headed about the fickle nature of the industry. “I think everybody kind of goes through that, thinking they’ll never work again, right? And that’ll probably happen again,” he says self-deprecatingly.

He went on to dominate TV crime thrillers with roles in Justified, The Shield and Sons of Anarchy, as well as acerbic comedies like Vice Principals. Neo-Western films like Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight were perfect vehicles to showcase his range; of being able to move from genuinely menacing roles to hilarious personas with impeccable comedic timing. Now, he’s finally graduated into his main-man era.

Such a back catalogue, along with his infectious grin and whole wise-cracking, affable vibe, have always made him popular with fans out on the street. “It’s something about my personality, but people feel like they know me,” he says. “And people have been coming up to me for different roles for a number of years. I’ve been lucky to be a part of things that have resonated with people for a long time. This right now just happens to be on a much bigger scale.”

The next story he’s hoping fans move on to is his newest film, The Uninvited, written and directed by his wife. No, he didn’t have to audition, he tells me, when I call out the nepotism. “Hah!” he chuckles. “A nepo baby! No, wait, that makes me a spouse baby!”

Set in a gorgeous LA house, actor Rose (Elizabeth Reaser) and her agent husband Sammy (Goggins) are throwing a party for Sammy’s star clients, when a confused elderly woman turns up, claiming that their house is hers. The piece was initially conceived by Conners as a play, and this intimacy still shines through as a film, which is a warm exploration of relationships and loneliness — Goggins says when he first read the script on a plane that he “cried uncontrollably”.

At one point in our chat, I have to pick up the mini Goggins in my laptop and walk him through to another room in my house. “It’s like an Architectural Digest tour of your place!” he quips, en route. If only it were as spectacular as Goggins’s own video tour of his stunning 1920s Scottish hunting lodge in upstate New York, where he lives with his family, which racked up more than 4.6 million views on YouTube in just two months. “Did it? Really?” he says when I tell him his house is doing the numbers online. “Wow, that’s a lot of people,” he adds, seemingly astonished that so many people would be so invested in it.

His house is an incredible place, full of history — Walt Disney, Joan Crawford and “the House of Windsor” all once visited as guests of the previous owners — but the appeal of the video to his fans is to see Goggins warmly and candidly throw out little anecdotes about his life on the estate, including the former linen closet, now his on-site cocktail snug.

It’s clear that this is a man who lives to entertain, and certainly enjoys a drink or two — he even has his own brand of whiskey, gin and vodka, called Mulholland Distilling. So how true to life is the Hollywood party in the film, skewering industry bashes and the egotistical actors who frequent them? “You know, I’ve been throwing parties for a really long time, and certainly when no one had any idea what my f***ing name was,” he says. “And those were as much fun as they are, when you look around a room and there are people that you recognise. But no, none of those parties that we’ve thrown or we’ve been invited to are predicated on any of that.” And he might have moved from the bright lights of La La Land to the wilds of the Hudson Valley in 2021, but Goggins still wants to let the good times roll.

“We have the same parties where we live now. And you look around and hopefully if you’re hosting, you have a room full of really interesting people. And hopefully, if you’re a guest, you can be an interesting person to the other people that have assembled.”

Also starring in The Uninvited is the other man of the moment, Pedro Pascal, who recently broke hearts in a traumatising episode of the second season of The Last of Us. The two have been friends for a while, and they’ve both universally been declared “the internet’s daddy” — an older, distinguished guy who also happens to be incredibly hot. Is this something the two men ribbed each other about on set, being the heartthrobs of HBO?

“No,” he says, cracking that big grin again and visibly lighting up talking about Pascal. “No, we’ve never had that conversation. I just think that Pedro is the cat’s meow. I think he’s the chef’s kiss, certainly in front of the camera, but just as a human being. I’m in love with Pedro Pascal, and so, it stands to reason, is the rest of the world. You know, why wouldn’t you be in love with him? It’s just cool when you see your friends do really well.”

There’s just time for one final question before he dashes back to set to continue filming as the nose-less Ghoul in the second series of Emmy-nominated video-game adaptation, Fallout. What are his thoughts about becoming a perhaps unlikely sex symbol later in his life? His love for dressing up can be seen in his recent internet-breaking photo shoots — you know, the ones on these pages where he’s in canary yellow Speedos, or topless riding a horse — and it’s clear he’s having a ball not only being everyone’s favourite leading man, but being fashion’s darling.

However, he explains it all in his typically Zen manner: “I don’t look at movies or roles or wearing clothes or food as a crazy experience, or ‘too wild’ or ‘too out there’. Whatever the conversation dictates, whatever topic anybody wants to talk about at the dinner table, you go there, whatever the story is asking from you, you try to get as much out of it as you possibly can.

“If a photographer has shown up with an idea and has invited me to collaborate in their vision for something, you can bet I’m going to put my heart into it. If there’s an interview, or if someone’s cooking a meal, or if a person has made a piece of music, I’m going to listen to it with my ears wide open. I just try to be present for all of it.” And his presence is a gift for us all.

THE UNINVITED is in cinemas 9 May (theuninvited.movie)

Photography by Sinna Nasseri for CULTURED Magazine's CULT100 issue