Walton Goggins on Rebirth and Near-Death

It has been the most blissful, circuitous kind of path,” Walton Goggins is saying. “I’ve been torn down to nothing and rebuilding. I feel like I’ve been reborn. I do. I feel like I’ve gone through my mama’s vagina. I’ve gone through the birthing canal. I feel liberated, man. Yeah. I feel unencumbered. I feel light.”

This is his first answer. The first question was, So, how’s it going?

It’s the day after the Emmys, and in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, Goggins—a nominee last night for playing karma-crossed revenge-seeker Rick Hatchett in season three of The White Lotus—sits before me, grinning and glowingly tan.

No, he didn’t win. And no, he won’t say whom he would have thanked, in case he gets another chance to thank them later. But inside the Peacock Theater, during a commercial break, he went up to his old friend Sam Rockwell (who was also nominated, for his guest-star turn on The White Lotus, and didn’t win either).

This is what I was going to say about you, Goggins said to Rockwell, and whispered it in his ear, and Rockwell said, Okay, this is what I was going to say about you, and whispered that to Goggins.

“That was really honest and very real,” Goggins says. “And I said, ‘Well, we just said it to each other, so what more do we want?’ ”

Then this morning he woke up—after “carrying the weight of this guy and his prolonged sadness for so long,” during and after The White Lotus—and he “looked in a mirror and said, ‘Hello, Walton, nice to meet you.’ ”

You’d finally let go of Rick.

“Gone,” Goggins confirms. “I went over to the bathroom, washed my face, and I looked at myself. I was like, Oh, there you are. Good to meet you. Where do you go from here? What is the next adventure?”

So ended Goggins’s awards season, and with it a year of hyper-visibility. Between The White Lotus and his wild last run as a coked-up Baby Billy in the final episodes of The Righteous Gemstones, 2025 will go down as the year Goggins finally graduated, at 54, from the cult-character-actor club to near omnipresence.

“If you say it, I’ll believe it,” he says. “I am having a good time. And there has been a shift, and things have changed. But that doesn’t mean that can’t also circle back on itself.”