Walton Goggins has had a hell of a year.
Just a week after wrapping the fourth and final season of HBO hit The Righteous Gemstones in May, the US actor made his debut hosting spot on Saturday Night Live and two months after that, he turned in an Emmy-nominated performance in the third season of The White Lotus.
This week, the Alabama-born star is in Sydney to promote the second season of Prime Video’s Fallout, for which he already scored an Emmy nomination as the Hollywood actor-turned-ghoul, Cooper Howard, in season one.
Despite flying in from Madrid the night before, Goggins is as relaxed and cheerful as you’d hope. There’s no concern about jet lag either. “For me, I just look at the clock wherever I am and that’s the time I’m on,” he smiles.
L-R: Moten, Purnell, Goggins in Sydney. Image: Prime Video
Fallout, based on the hugely popular video game franchise, was an instant hit for Prime Video. Set 200 years after the Great War of 2077, where a nuclear holocaust has wiped out society, Lucy (Ella Purnell) treks through the wasteland in search of her father, where she meets mutated Howard (Goggins) and Maximus (Aaron Moten) along the way. Following its premiere in April 2024, the show was greenlit for a second season that same month, and having now racked up over 100 million views and one of the streamer’s top three titles of all time, it’s no surprise that a third season was given the go-ahead this past May.
The 54-year-old actor knows it’s an incredible achievement, too, but he understands there’s an obligation for everyone involved in the production.
“I’ve been very fortunate over the course of my career. I’ve done, I don’t know how many movies, I’ve done a lot of television,” he pauses, “and in this space, what I do know that is that if you were able to build a critical mass in the first chapter of a story, I’m not even gonna say a season because to me that just makes it TV [and] I don’t believe that there is a difference… you have an extraordinary opportunity in the second chapter of that story to do something transcendent.
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“You can play it safe or you can do what most of the writers that I’ve been associated with or collaborated with over the years, and that is you can go for broke. You can lean right into it and expand upon this world in ways that you didn’t think possible, and that’s the choice that [executive producer Jonathan Nolan and show creators Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet] decided to take this in.
“I was so grateful for the effort put in by everyone in season one. Looking at it now, it feels like it’s the overture, like it’s just the beginning. We really begin to look under the covers in this second iteration of this experience, and we know now that we have a season three, so the story will continue.”
‘Fallout’ season two. Image: Prime Video
Some fans might be shocked to learn Goggins actively stayed away from playing the Fallout game while preparing for the role. But it’s more common than most think. The Last of Us showrunners asked the main cast to avoid the game; Steve Carell didn’t watch any of The Office before he took on the now-iconic role of Michael Scott in the US iteration; There’s a simple reason for it, Goggins says. If he got lost in the game, the character and the story would have suffered.
“It has to be your own experience, and I believe that I would be doing a disservice to this community of people if I were to become as big a fan of the game as the players of this game, right?” he explains. I would be compromised, and I wouldn’t hold these scripts, these stories up to the same standard, and, and, and I, I think a lot of us feel that way.
“Everybody above my pay grade makes sure that this world is filled out with a texture that is this world. We’re not stepping out of that lane. But I believe that Cooper Howard is real. I believe that the Ghoul is real. So, to play the game… that just wouldn’t be good for me.”
The theory worked. Despite detaching himself from the universe of the Fallout game, Goggins’ performance went on to score several award nominations, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series at this year’s Emmy Awards. And in just eight episodes, The Ghoul was a fan favourite character for fans of the show.
Stealing the spotlight is a talent of Goggins. He first gained attention in the 2000s crime drama series The Shield, as Detective Shane Vendrell, before landing the hugely popular role of FX’s neo-Western Justified, in which he scored his first-ever Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2011. He played a transgender sex worker in another hit show, Sons of Anarchy. Eventually, Hollywood came calling. Specifically, iconic director Quentin Tarantino, who had seen Goggins’ impressive work and cast him in the 2015 blockbuster, The Hateful Eight.
It would have been fair to think at the time that the drama and or Western worlds would be where Goggins’ career played out. But just a year after The Hateful Eight, he starred opposite comedy titan Danny McBride in HBO’s Vice Principals as the deranged and hilarious Lee Russell. He went on to feature in another McBride production – The Righteous Gemstones, in which he played yet another fan favourite, Baby Billy Freeman.
‘The Righteous Gemstones’
And just when you thought comedy might be the newfound passion for Goggins, he takes on the disturbed, irritated and arguably most intriguing character of the latest season of The White Lotus, Rick Hatchett, for which he picked up yet another Emmy nomination.
Does Goggins have a preference anymore, or a “happy place” where he feels most comfortable? It’s a question he needs a minute to consider.
“Any actor worth their weight in salt would be lying to you if they didn’t say, ‘I just want a box to fit in.'” he begins. ‘Just give me a fucking box so it means I can put food on the table.’ That’s true. If you’re able to get that, well then you have to fight your way out of that, right? Sometimes you’re given that opportunity, sometimes you can choose that opportunity, sometimes that opportunity never comes.
“The one thing that I will say, the one thing that scared me more than anything, and I mean this, was being known for one thing. I think that would have broken my heart. Regardless of the money or regardless of the financial security, to just be known for one thing… like a really talented songwriter who has so much to say about the world and just writes one catchy song, and that’s what everybody sings, that would have broken my heart. Luckily for me, that didn’t happen. Some of that was luck, some of that was just making the most of the opportunities that I’ve been given.
“I feel like I’m at a place in my life right now where my lane still has room to grow, you know? There are a couple of movies that I’m looking at and a few opportunities that are coming my way that are so outside of anything that I thought for myself. I mean, playing a transgender sex worker was outside of anything I thought for myself, but the story was so good. It was like, what an incredible opportunity to walk in this person’s shoes and to see the world from her point of view. I feel that way about a number of the things that are coming up for me, and they’re not the same, but there is a thread throughout all of it, and a lot of them are lonely people. A lot of them are marginalised, or in their minds misunderstood. That is a recurring kind of thing for me and it’s also inherent in the other things I wanna do.
‘The White Lotus’. Image: BINGE
Though the last 10-15 years in particular have been hugely successful for Goggins, he’s not an overnight success. Think of some of the biggest shows in the ’90s and he’s been on there – Beverly Hills, 90210, JAG, NYPD Blue. His first feature film came in an uncredited role in Billy Crystal’s 1992 comedy, Mr. Saturday Night.
Goggins won’t pretend like the last few years haven’t been enjoyable, but he is adamant he was just fine before the fame and success came along.
“I am so grateful. Happy is not the right word, I’m content,” he says. “I can go back to things that a lot of people haven’t seen, and I was just as happy. I mean, I got The Apostle with Robert Duvall when I was 24 years old. I did Shanghai Noon with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson, who’s one of my heroes! I was happy with my life then.
“The agent that I had at the time, who was a dear friend of mine, I expressed frustration not for the lack of opportunity, but I just felt like there’s more that I want to say, and will those opportunities get easier to say them? When does it become easier for someone to take a chance on me? And he said, the answer is now or never. Your career is never going to be made with one thing. It is in the aggregate that people will look at the path that you’ve been walking on a very long time and, and they will hopefully respect it because you respect stories so much. I believe that that’s what’s happened to me.
“I’m not a results-oriented guy. I’m not a Machiavellian guy… I don’t want anything specifically from the world. I generally like to give as much as I can to the world. I’m in the space of working with these corporations in a commercial sort of way. I didn’t see that coming, but man, I am fucking loving it! It is telling a story in 30 seconds. It means just as much to me as making a movie or doing a television show because I get the opportunity to express myself my way, and they’re saying we want you to do your version of it. I show up for a fucking conversation or for a job, or for a dinner, whether I’m eating alone, whether I’m doing it to with myself in a mirror, or whether there are 100 million people watching. That’s irrelevant to me. I’ve been happy all, all along.
“But if this means that I get to continue doing what I do for a living and do it in ways that surprise me, well, man, what greater gift is there from this life? If my life ends tomorrow, don’t feel bad for me, man. I’ve lived every day like it’s my last. I’m just happy and grateful.
Fallout season two premieres on Prime Video on December 17.
