🎧 Walton Goggins On What ‘The White Lotus’ Set Was Really Like For Him
The Emmy nominee explains how ‘emotionally hard’ playing Rick was — and relief when Sam Rockwell showed up: ‘Normalcy... like I’m not a f-ing freak’
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Walton Goggins’ mind was elsewhere when we spoke earlier this month, and it’s hard to blame him. As you read this, Goggins and his 14-year-old son are in the wilderness of western Mongolia, riding horses and exploring the world in a way that might even make the characters on The White Lotus jealous. “He has that wanderlust like I do,” Goggins says about his son, Augustus, who rode horses with a GQ profile writer last fall. “There’s nothing that can replace that exposure to the world at this age.”
A working actor since the 1990s, when he dropped out of Georgia Southern University to move to Los Angeles and soon booked bit parts in the likes of The Next Karate Kid and The Apostle, Goggins, 53, is proud of how far around the world his work has taken him. But the set of The White Lotus was a challenge for the veteran actor — not just the many months spent on location in Thailand, but the isolating experience of spending all that time in the headspace of his character, Rick, a man grappling with the death of his mother and absence of his father. Goggins calls the show, about guests at a luxury resort who become embroiled in trials and tribulations ranging from trivial inconveniences to actual death, “a golden ticket for anybody who wants to go through an existential crisis.”
On today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, I talk to Goggins about what it was like to be the first member of that massive White Lotus cast to speak publicly about his experience on set, since he was doing Emmys press for Fallout last summer, even as The White Lotus was still in production. (“We’re guests checking into a hotel, playing guests checking in to a hotel. We spend all this time together, whether we like it or not,” Goggins said somewhat ominously to the Los Angeles Times in May of last year.) We also talk about the “Stockholm Syndrome” he experienced on that set, and what it was like when his real-life friend Sam Rockwell arrived a few months into production, breaking him out of that bubble of isolation he’d been immersed in as Rick.
“I'll never forget getting out of that van in Bangkok and just running to Sam’s trailer,” Goggins tells me. “I didn't even knock, I just opened the door and I just went and picked him up and hugged him. It just felt like, oh God, some normalcy. Like, I'm not a fucking freak — excuse my language.”
Hear all of that and much more on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, which also includes the fourth part of my fall preview series, breaking down the awards hopes and potential struggles of indie studios A24 and Mubi with Ankler Media’s deputy editor, Christopher Rosen, and returning guest Esther Zuckerman. As a reminder, paid subscribers to Prestige Junkie After Party can watch the full video version of this and all of our other podcasts, in addition to getting access to bonus episodes, Substack Lives, call-in shows and much more. Join us!
