Walton Goggins: the hottest hairline in town

Photographs by Ramona Rosales

Styling by Rebecca Ramsey

Walton Goggins does not seem tired. “But I am,” he says, his southern vowels stretched in long diphthongs. “I’m tired, Emma John. Yeah, I am.” Fair enough. Yesterday he spent 15 hours shooting the second series of Fallout, the big-budget Amazon production, before heading straight to bed. Tomorrow he’ll return to a Hollywood set to fling himself through more video-game-inspired shoot-’em-up scenes. This is the most physically demanding work Goggins has ever done – and he’s been at it for five months.

Still, if this is Goggins fatigued, the full-energy version must be a sight to behold. We meet on Zoom, a consequence of his crazed schedule. The bright rows of teeth, familiar to viewers who have followed his work over the past three decades, are beaming. He’s wearing tortoiseshell specs and a black shirt unbuttoned to the sternum. In conversation, he is excited by any and all subjects, from Appalachia to the apocalypse. (When I mention that I once wrote a book on bluegrass music, he gives a sudden, slightly yearning “Aye-eee!”)

Behind him I see glimpses of the friend-of-a-friend’s house in which he’s staying, alone. The first thing he does when he’s separated from his family – his wife, the director Nadia Conners, and their 14-year-old son, Augustus – is head to the wine store, he says. “Then I pick up a shit-ton of candles and string lights, and I get charcuterie, and I have music playing all the time, to fill my life that way. I try to squeeze out every ounce of joy that I possibly can.”

Oh, to be more like a Walton.

We’re talking exactly a week after The White Lotus finale aired. Perhaps you saw it, and perhaps you’re aware of what happened next: how his portrayal of the tragically conflicted, revenge-driven Rick propelled Goggins from one of LA’s workingest TV actors into a bona-fide leading man. That’s an unusual enough promotion for a man in his 50s. But in the last few days, since co-star Jason Isaacs spoke of friction and romance between White Lotus cast members, Goggins has become an internet obsession. People who didn’t know his name a year ago have been furiously and forensically analysing his social media for a whiff of rift or scandal. (Is he feuding with Aimee Lou Wood? Is he not?) That, or aggressively debating his sex appeal.

Goggins shows no sign of being fazed by any of it. “It’s been a rather big kind of week, right?” he says. “I mean, for a number of reasons.”

Goggins was born in Alabama in 1971. He was 19 when he moved to LA to begin his career and he’s been used to a specific level of recognition and reward ever since. He spent seven seasons making his name as a corrupt detective on The Shield, then six co-starring with Timothy Olyphant in Justified. In the past few years, his performance as crooked evangelist Baby Billy in The Righteous Gemstones, Danny McBride’s comedy set in South Carolina has won him more acclaim. But the megawatt spotlight is new. “The White Lotus is a juggernaut,” he says. “It’s like the Super Bowl of culture.” He’s attempting to “honour the moment” by remaining the man he’s always been. “I mean I’m 53 years old, so I’m not a neophyte. I’m gonna make mistakes just like everybody else will make mistakes, but my heart’s always in the right place.”

He says he’s flattered by the attention. I ask who he feels he can talk to about what’s currently happening to him. “That’s a great question. I don’t have those conversations with my friends. 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.”

Instead, he keeps grounded with routine. “I wake up and I have two cappuccinos and I think about my place in this larger kind of life,” he says. Then he works out at the gym and speaks to his wife and son. This morning he read a movie script he’s interested in. “I’m only on page 30, Emma John. So, like in life, shit can go sideways.”

Goggins has appeared in a decent roster of movies. Quentin Tarantino enjoyed his performance in Django Unchained so much he gave him a bigger part in The Hateful Eight. But now the roles he’s being offered are changing. “You’re moved up a list, right? And that’s very, very, very exciting in the film world. For a long time the opportunities that I was afforded in TV, I wasn’t being afforded in film.”

Goggins will next star in The Uninvited, an indie dramedy written and directed by his wife, Conners, inspired by a real-life incident. “We like parties,” Goggins says, “and the home that we had in Los Angeles before moving to the East Coast was perfect for that.” One night, as they got ready to have people over, a confused woman drove up to their garage, trying to get in. “I came down and said, ‘I’m so sorry, can I help you? Are you OK?’ And she said, ‘This is my home.’ And I said, ‘Well, no ma’am, I don’t think this is your home, but where is it that you think you are?’”

Conners sat with her while Goggins resumed hosting duties, and the encounter stayed with her. In the movie, an increasingly overlooked actor and mother – played by Elizabeth Reaser – cares for the elderly stranger, while her agent husband (Goggins) entertains showbiz friends and clients. When Conners first asked her husband to take the part, he resisted. “I said, I can’t, Nadia,” because “there’s a version of our relationship in there.” But his wife insisted – “I want your neuroses” – and he relented. After an awkward couple of days of filming they settled into a groove.

Still, as Goggins is keen to point out, they’ve been working together ever since they first met, on a blind date, nearly 20 years ago. “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. 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.”

Pascal appears in The Uninvited alongside Goggins. His other BFF is Sam Rockwell, with whom he appeared in some of The White Lotus’s most electric scenes. While he’s maddeningly discreet about on-set events – “I rarely talk to anyone about those experiences, because they’re just so personal to me” – he’s unstoppable when I ask him who he’s felt lucky to work with. Chris Cooper, Samuel L Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewell, Anthony Hopkins, Billy Crudup, Guy Pearce... “And I’ve never taken it for granted. Ever.”

He mentions the phone message he’s kept from Robert Duvall, his mentor and “true north” ever since they worked together on The Apostle, when Goggins was 25. I don’t hear it, but I do get an entertainingly throaty impersonation (“Hey, it’s Bobby! It’s a beautiful, beautiful movie, Walton!”) Duvall, of course, is another screen actor measured by his intensity rather than his looks. And while Vogue is currently hot for his hairline, Goggins has always been charmingly candid about the limits it has put on his career.

Today that tall forehead works as an extended canvas, but only a month into acting classes, his teacher David Legrant pulled him aside and told him he would have to work harder than everybody else in the room because he “didn’t have the looks”. He believes that has kept his ego in check – and kept him working. Plenty of his peers will pass on roles they consider beneath them. Goggins has always thought it’s better just to go to work. “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.”

His humour is ebullient, even a little goofy – he’s far less intimidating than most of the characters he has played. When he jokily demands my input on the photoshoot for this interview – “Tell me what to wear, Emma John!” – I ask who he’s wearing now. He’s not sure, so he pulls at his shirt collar and brings it close to the camera for me to read the label. “Tom Ford,” I say. “Look at that,” he says, and then, “I actually went to a dinner a couple of nights ago and Tom Ford was there. That’s the cool thing about being in this business for a long time, you get to meet people you admire.”

Talk turns to his son, who has inherited a taste for the old-timey music Goggins learned to clog to. And then comes something unexpected: he tells me he never wanted children. Having grown up in rural Georgia with an absent father – he was raised by “seven women”, his mother, grandmother and aunts – he didn’t think he’d be able to parent. And even when he and Conners decided to have a child, he was distraught to discover they were having a boy.

“I said, no-no-no no, not me, I can’t. I’ll let him down.”

This summer they’ll go horseback riding together across Western Mongolia – Augustus is deep into the history of the Khans – and before then there’s a long trip through Europe. For Goggins, the end of his shooting schedule in June will offer the first chance to spend quality time with his family in a long while – he has spent only five weeks of the past 18 months at home. The separation has been “extremely painful”, he says. “But my son has been so patient and kind. So we’re all just waiting to get to that finish line.”

There’s one more story he wants to tell me before he goes, one he hopes will tell me more about who he is. “So you know what, Emma John? I’m taking over this interview.” And he rewinds 30 years to a time he visited the family home of a girl he was dating. “You know, I’m a Southern boy, manners and respect are everything to me”, so he sat at the table listening intently to her parents and grandparents. “And her grandfather said, ‘Stop looking at me. I feel like you’re looking through me, and it makes me very uncomfortable.’ And I felt such shame in that moment, thinking, ‘What have I done? It’s just my face. I don’t know how to listen differently.’”

Goggins says the comment weighed on him a long time, until he came to accept “That’s who I am, and I dig it.” “And I had someone recently say to me, ‘Your energy is way too intense for me.’ I thought about responding, ‘Well, your energy isn’t intense enough for me!’ But I held back. I said, ‘I understand that, everybody’s not for everybody. But I am where I am, and I love it.’” And with that he’s off – to live like a Walton.

The Uninvited is in cinemas 9 May