One does not interview Walton Goggins alone. He may show up without an entourage, but people are going to join the conversation. Not just the young women who yell, ‘We love you!’ from their white Toyota SUVs when they see him walking down the street. And not just the two women at the table next to us who he’s going to include when he senses they’re listening. But friends. Nearly everyone in Los Angeles that I told about my upcoming interview had met him. At a party. On a job. In the home-goods store they worked at. And every one of them was charmed.
Which might explain why the twice Emmy-nominated Goggins has, at 53, become an unlikely sex symbol after a career playing scary or downright unpleasant men – one with Nazi tattoos (in hit US crime drama Justified), one without a nose (as an undead creature in Amazon Prime’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi Fallout).
His heartthrob status is specifically due to his role as taciturn Rick Hatchett in the third season of The White Lotus. Goggins and on-screen lover Aimee Lou Wood were the standout stars of the show, dying in each other’s arms in the explosive finale. ‘I’m so relieved it’s out in the world,’ he says of that final episode. ‘It’s been uplifting getting to finally talk to people about it. For the first time in a long time I can exhale. A big exhale. Rick Hatchett was a lot to carry.’
He seems thrilled with this new-found attention, though. ‘I experience it with a healthy amount of gratitude and a big smile on my face and a smile in my heart,’ he says, beaming. The White Lotus has been measurably massive, pulling in 16 million viewers an episode in the US alone. Goggins’ other HBO series, The Righteous Gemstones, also benefited from the popularity of The White Lotus by airing immediately afterwards, scooping in another one million viewers every episode. It is a good time to be Goggins, I say, as the waiter approaches with salmon and a rice bowl. ‘Oh my god! Look at this. Where have you been all my life?’ The waiter apologises – the order is the same as his, but for another table. Not everything can go Goggins’ way. ‘Yeah. I guess he’s not watching The White Lotus.’
Everyone else has been. Women in the restaurant are sneaking glances. ‘It’s great that he has a zaddy [millennial speak for a hot older man] internet status,’ says Nadia Conners, TV writer and Goggins’ wife, who wrote and directed The Uninvited, an upcoming (and under £1 million budget) film starring her husband, Pedro Pascal and Rufus Sewell.
Taking a break with White Lotus co-stars Leslie Bibb and Aimee Lou Wood
It’s about a middle-aged mum losing herself as she cares for others. Conners and I meet at Chateau Marmont a few days before my interview with her husband. The hotel is where they had their first blind date in 2005. It’s also where they came after they were married in 2011 – a four-guest wedding with actors Kate Bosworth and Johnny Galecki, screenwriter Scott Z Burns and Goggins’ and Conners’ newborn son Augustus the only invitees. The ceremony was in the back yard of their old home in Los Angeles, near Runyon Canyon. ‘He’s aged like fine wine,’ says Conners. ‘But it is hard as I’m a middle-aged woman. So suddenly I feel like, “All these women find him attractive.” But what’s so amazing is he’s always made me feel like the most beautiful woman in the room.’
Goggins certainly dresses like the guy you’d hope would call you the most beautiful woman in the room. In fact he dresses a lot like his character in The White Lotus. Today he’s in a one-of-a-kind black Thom Browne blazer, well-worn APC raw denim jeans and a Paul Smith tuxedo shirt with the top three buttons undone, displaying a chain with a stone pendant he bought in Rome.
‘I don’t think I’m a materialistic guy,’ he says. ‘But sometimes you see something that you feel like, “Yeah, that’s an expression of who I am, and it would be a part of who I am going forward.” I’ll wear a tuxedo shirt with jeans every day.’ But when asked to show his most prized possessions in a video for Esquire, many were rocks from vacations.
Goggins grew up in Georgia, raised by a mum who made $12,000 a year and let him run feral. ‘I live in fear of being without money,’ he tells me. ‘It’s the monkey that I can’t seem to get off my back – it’s always there. But it doesn’t rule my life the way it used to. I live a life of restraint and excess and I don’t acquire a lot of things, though I’m not afraid to acquire the things I want.’
A baseball accident when he was ten knocked out Goggins’ top teeth, leading to the big white choppers that flash both charmingly and menacingly. His parents divorced when he was three. His non-famous father – also named Walton Goggins – is a ‘strange dude’ who still dresses in a cowboy hat, leather and turquoise jewellery and carries signed pictures of himself to give to anyone who looks his way (Goggins junior and senior recently met up in NYC). When Goggins Jr was 14, his publicist aunt took him on tour with B B King, who gave him $100 and told him to see the world. Even more than acting that has been his goal since. He and Conners have even talked about hosting a travel show.
Travel has been healing for Goggins. In 2004 his first wife, Leanne Kaun, from whom he had been separated for a year, died by suicide by jumping off a building. To help recover from this, he took his mum to Thailand. So when he shot The White Lotus scenes on some of the same small streets in Bangkok he had visited 18 years earlier, he was overcome with emotion. ‘It was hard. I was telling a story that was different, but not so dissimilar from my own,’ he says. ‘It is a pain that I think so many people can relate to. The majority of us have experienced something traumatic that we become obsessed with, and for a period of time our story is defined by it. And you’ll either move past it or you won’t.’
With his wife, Nadia Conners, at The Emmys, 2024
While he says he doesn’t have as much angst as he used to, he still clearly feels things deeply. ‘I am an emotional person. I cry with my friends. I cry with my wife. I hold my wife. I kiss my wife. I also do a job that allows me access to what I’m feeling constantly. And I’ve been blessed to do that for a really long time,’ he says.
When his agents told him over dinner that The White Lotus creator Mike White wanted him to be in the show, he immediately called Conners and wept.
‘What made you cry?’ I ask.
‘It’s a golden ticket, but more than that, it was just the opportunity to go on a journey that comes from that man’s [White’s] imagination. Things that are interesting to him are interesting to me,’ he says. Although not snakes. Goggins has a true terror of snakes, a few of which he had to remove, one at a time, from their cages during a scene in episode three. And some of them were poisonous. He was so afraid he was crying and barely remembering which were the ones he wasn’t supposed to touch. And then one bit him. (He was fine, but the next day a producer suggested he go to the hospital to get some shots, just to be safe.)
Yet he’s not a man who is afraid of much. During Covid, he got a Mercedes Sprinter van and took his family on a cross-country trip. Then they moved from LA to the Hudson Valley in New York, where they live now. Home is an enormous 100-year-old house in the style of a Scottish hunting lodge, and when he took Architectural Digest around for a video tour a few months ago, he showed off a framed pistol that Samuel L Jackson gave him after they wrapped The Hateful Eight. Pointing to the large piece of land the house lies on, he says that he sometimes studies scripts outside without clothes on.
‘I’ve been naked in the back yard of every house I’ve ever owned,’ he says. ‘You wake up in the morning and you have a beautiful cup of coffee with clothes or sans clothes and feel the air on your body. I don’t think I’m an exhibitionist. I don’t make that choice to put on clothes or not put on clothes. I just know I’m going to have a cup of coffee.’
He has decorated the house mostly by himself. Conners does the cooking, but he does all the cleaning. ‘He’s an obsessive cleaner,’ she says. ‘He’s the most productive person I’ve ever met. If you give him something to do, it will get done, whether it’s a movie or the dishes. The wonderful thing about our son is he kind of got my intellectual buffet of ideas and his dad’s completion gene.’
The giant house with huge fireplaces is designed for hosting, which is perfect for Goggins. Even eating this salmon and rice is the act of a host: he normally eats only one meal a day, at 4pm, though he’s not rigid about it. ‘Everything in moderation, including moderation. I don’t shy away from a good time and I don’t shy away from being hyper-focused. I try not to shy away from anything,’ he says.
As for the fitness routine that gives him a permanent six-pack, he says, ‘My workout? I smoke cigarettes. I drink negronis.’ He also runs three to four miles a day, although lately he’s been walking uphill on his treadmill while he studies scripts. ‘I exercise every day. I do push-ups and pull-ups and crunches and eat healthy and party my ass off. I live a life.’
His phone rings and he apologises for taking the call. He listens for a minute and then busts out in full Goggins. ‘You did it because you’re aces! You’re the ace in the hole! You’re the best of the best and I’m so proud of you,’ he declares. His son Augustus, now 14, had been worried about a test and reported that things had gone well. Goggins is taking him on an 18-day trip to Mongolia this summer because his son is interested in the languages of the region. Also, Augustus will get to use his skill of shooting a bow and arrow from a moving horse. This is something Goggins feels is even more aces than nailing that test.
He ducks outside to smoke a cigarette then, after saying bye to Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul, sitting across from us, we go for a coffee at Alcove café. A guy on the street collecting donations for a gun-control charity spots Goggins and asks for a selfie. It’s an improvement on decades of having fans yell out his character names. Years ago, Conners suggested a title for his future biography: I Don’t Know Your Name, But I Love What You Do: The Walton Goggins Story.
He hands over his Gold Amex card to make a donation, but the fan says there are a few forms to fill out for that, so Goggins says he’ll try to catch him on the way back.
As we walk down the sidewalk, Goggins puts his arm around me. Sometimes when he talks, he’ll touch my shoulder or elbow, like we’re pals walking down Brooklyn alleys in the 1940s. He asks, after a passing woman tells him how much she likes his work, why I think people think he’s sexy, going back to my first question of the afternoon. I stammer about confidence and cheekbones and our culture’s Jack Nicholson vacuum but he settles on a fact that’s truer. ‘I can live in the future and I can live in the past, but I try in the company of other people to really be present. I try to do that in my work, with my wife, with my family, with my son, with my friends and with a stranger.’
Eventually, Goggins leaves to nap. He does this for an hour a day (to the sound of an app that makes the sound of a fan) and is able to awake with no alarm. He has a 4:30pm call time for the second season of Fallout, which starts with nose-erasing time in the make-up chair.
We walk back to the Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet he’s scored as a free rental via Fallout creator Jonathan Nolan’s connections. Goggins ran a valet company when he moved to LA in 1991 with $300 in his pocket. This Porsche, he says, is the greatest driving experience ever. He lowers the top, jacks up the music, tells me we’ll grab cocktails sometime and flashes that smile. ‘I put the top down and don’t care about anything. Just the music from the speakers. I’ve got a Sprinter van I take out in the desert and this f***ing blue Porsche,’ he says, a man who cannot believe his luck, but isn’t going to miss a minute of it.
The Uninvited (theuninvited.movie) is in cinemas on 9 May
Assistant photographer: Adam Aguilar.
Make-up: Nelly Baumann.
Shot at Leica Gallery Los Angeles.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GOGGINS
The next White Lotus location
Somewhere in the snow? An ice hotel? The desert? People are tired of going to the beach – thankfully, I don’t have to come up with the answer.
Your idea of vacation hell
A theme park.
Your go-to karaoke song
We had a karaoke party during The White Lotus and I went with ‘Alison’ [by Elvis Costello]. Natasha Rothwell [who plays Belinda] is a really good singer. Aimee Lou Wood [Chelsea] is a phenomenal singer. The rest of us just did our thing. If you’ve got enough charisma, people won’t care what you sound like. I’m proof of that.
Last piece of clothing you bought
A black suit. I travel with three suits. And hats. You never know what you’re going to be invited to.
Your most played song last year
‘The Corner’ by Lewsberg. This is my Rick Hatchett [his White Lotus character] song. A lot of actors create a playlist for their experience going into a role.
The movie that makes you cry every time you watch it
Places In The Heart [1984, with Sally Field and Ed Harris]. It’s just a beautiful film.
Artificial intelligence: terrific or terrifying?
I don’t know where it goes from here. No one does. That’s terrifying, I suppose, on some level. So was going to the moon. But it’s here. If we as a society all agree that it’s too much, then I expect we’ll put guardrails on it.
