🎧 Walton Goggins: 'I Can Get Along with F-ing Anybody'
The beloved actor calls me on a rare day off to reveal some secrets of his career longevity
On Apple Podcasts, subscribe and listen here.
“I can get along with fucking anybody,” says Walton Goggins. “I can work with anyone. I mean, I have my process like everybody else, and I figure, well, why wouldn’t they want to work with me?”
That’s the attitude Goggins has brought to his career for more than 30 years now, and quite possibly what’s given him one of the most varied and enviable filmographies in the business. Watching his performances in The Shield and Justified or in such films as The Hateful Eight and the Oscar-winning short The Accountant, you understand why a director or showrunner would be eager to hire him.
But then you listen to him describe the process of starting to work with Fallout EP Jonathan Nolan — as I did for this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast — and a whole other facet of Goggins’s appeal becomes clear.
“I just give people the benefit of the doubt, to be quite honest with you,” Goggins told me, speaking on a rare day off after this whirlwind year of promoting Fallout, filming The White Lotus in Thailand and then returning to the South Carolina set of The Righteous Gemstones. “I knew three minutes into the conversation [with Nolan] that I just wanted to be around the man. Then once we got into it, I didn’t know what to expect, as with any director, really, or any actor. You just jump off a ledge and you try to show up with an open heart and say, ‘I’m going to give you my open heart and trust that you’re going to do the same.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
A Georgia native, Goggins was game for a remarkably wide-ranging conversation, covering everything from taking the stage at the Oscars when Ray McKinnon and Lisa Blount won the Oscar for The Accountant to the tiny differences between the South Carolina shag and the Florida bop. (Goggins, whose clogging skills are well-known, is very familiar with both.)
Hear it all on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast, which also includes the return of Chris Rosen as co-host. He helps me handicap what are still the most competitive races at this year’s Emmys. Subscribe to the podcast to hear it all!