How ‘White Lotus’ Star Walton Goggins Buried Rick Hatchett

It’s five in the morning. Walton Goggins sits on an airplane. He’s flying from Los Angeles to New York City, possessing one of the most protected artifacts in all of modern Hollywood: the full collection of scripts for the latest season of The White Lotus, the hottest show in town. Soaring across America, Goggins pours over Mike White‘s third season, on a collision course with a dark fate meant to unfold in Thailand. It’s a secret to everybody — even if the secrets themselves are somewhat lacking in security. 

“I had the scripts for these five episodes on my computer, just as PDFs,” he says, Negroni in hand and his voice rich with the enthusiasm of someone who’s just unearthed a buried treasure. He can’t help but reiterate: “Just as PDFs, dude!”

This point in time was a few days into the now-Emmy nominee’s White Lotus adventure. Earlier that week, he was at lunch with his agents hearing about the opportunity for the first time. Goggins wasn’t the first choice for the role of Rick Hatchett, the storm-clouded man destined to die at the end of White’s latest rendition of the one-percenter tragicomedy. But the actor originally intended for the role, Woody Harrelson, as Goggins remembers it, had officially turned it down. (THR revealed this in a White Lotus season three oral history.)

“This is second hand, so certainly not gospel,” he says with a laugh, “but I’m pretty sure he thought it was too much of a fucking drag. Rick is so sad, I don’t think he wanted to play him. I think that’s how the story goes.”

One man’s drag is another man’s treasure. This isn’t Goggins’ first rodeo with a bummer of a character, after all — and if you think so, The Shield‘s crooked cop Shane Vendrell would like a word. So when the actor was on that flight from LAX to JFK with the first five episodes in hand, he was on the edge of his seat, all in on the torment and all in on keeping the secret, even under insecure circumstances. 

“The password protection wasn’t working,” he says of the scripts. “But I said, ‘Buddy, I’ve done two Tarantino movies. If anyone’s hermetically sealed, it’s me.’ So they sent it.”

Goggins unsealed the scripts. He read the first five episodes. He landed in the greater metropolitan area and it was 8 p.m. when he sat back down to dig into the rest — it was 2 a.m. when he finished. In the span of less than a day, Goggins lived the entire recorded lifespan of Rick Hatchett, the man who wanted nothing more on earth than a score settled — nothing, of course, except maybe a hug. 

“It was like bingeing the show,” he remembers. “I was alone. And I was so deeply moved by it, by what Mike was saying with this character and the ways it mirrored some of my own journeys in life, and so many other people’s journeys.”

In Rick, Goggins saw a heightened version of a common tale. Early in his life, the character learns from his mother about a man called Jim Hollinger (played by Scott Glenn), who killed Rick’s father before he was born. Years pass. Rick gets involved in “this and that,” and all the criminality such a job description implies. Three weeks before what would be his death, as it played out in the heartbreaking April season finale, Rick sees Hollinger’s name in a paper and learns he’s become a hotel magnate who lives in Thailand. Hatchett books a flight. All that happens next? Amor fati, some might say. 

“Everyone walks around with so much pain,” Goggins says. “You mask it and you get by, but whether it’s a breakup or you lost a job or you left something unsaid, everyone’s got some measure of low-grade trauma. It just so happens for this character, it crescendos in this moment that’s spectacularly horrific.”

Cut to the spectacularly horrific crescendo. It’s months since Goggins first read Rick Hatchett’s final scene. Now, he’s living it. The actor has spent three days in these trenches, soaked in blood and sweat of his own making. His character has gunned down the man he long believed had killed his father, only to learn that — surprise! (and cue the Vader voice): He is his father. Hatchett’s soulmate, the vibrant Chelsea (fellow Emmy nominee Aimee Lou Wood), is dead, killed in the crossfire. Goggins holds the actress, with whom he says he formed an immediate connection with upon arriving in Thailand, right in his arms. And he does this again, and again, and again and again. Goggins is alive as Rick Hatchett is dying, fighting against a tide he can’t possibly defeat. 

“We shot it over three days,” he says of the tragic ending. “It’s the Rubicon. You know you have to cross it. I knew it eight months earlier when I read it. And you can’t escape it for those 72 hours.”

It’s hard to imagine wanting to embody the bone-deep agony at the core of a guy like Rick Hatchett. Then again, it’s hard imagining embodying the bone-deep intensity at the core of a guy like Walton Goggins. Gainfully employed on television and in film for decades now, the actor’s star is threatening to go supernova, whether it’s putting his soul on the line for The White Lotus, dancing his heart out on The Righteous Gemstones or taking a sultry bite out of a Dorito’s commercial. (Pro-tip: if you’re ever feeling blue, imagine the words “Golden Sriracha” in your best Goggins impression and you’ll feel right as rain.) At the mid-50s goalpost of his life, Goggins is not only thriving, he’s actively questing for a range of experiences as an actor, even if those experiences invite a sizable dose of misery into his life.

“Some of the best actors I’ve ever worked with crack jokes and keep it light between scenes,” he says. “But just as many enjoy staying in it. And that’s what I’ve gravitated toward.”

In other words, while Goggins isn’t a Method actor, he is an actor who stays as present with his characters as humanly possible. And so we return to the past, to that moment at two in the morning in New York City, on the other side of Goggins first experiencing Rick’s ending. He’s in the present with Rick. And he’s also peering into the future, knowing what it will require for him to take on this tragic figure’s life and death. 

So he makes a call. Literally. 

“I had [producer David Bernard’s] number in my phone, and I suppose I was fully prepared to lose the part,” he says, “because the first thing that came out of my mouth was: ‘This has touched me in a very profound way, but what I’m going to have to do in order to get to this ending I just read… it’s going to be very, very painful.’”

There are other obstacles in the way. The dreaded beast known as “scheduling” rears its head. Goggins, with an assist from longtime collaborator and best friend Danny McBride, slayed that beast, however, at least as it pertained to the final season of HBO’s beloved comedy The Righteous Gemstones, which he filmed on the immediate other side of finishing White Lotus. But it was trickier with his other series regular gig on Amazon’s Fallout, with press obligations for season one having directly coincided with the White Lotus production schedule. 

“When I give my word, I do everything I can to keep it,” he says. “And Fallout required all of us to get the word out.”

For a beat, it seemed over. Goggins, who at this point has already allowed himself to take on the burden of Hatchett — and who has woken up at seven in the morning and spent hours daydreaming about Rick’s life and death for the past several weeks on end — realizes he might not be able to live that life and die that death after all. And it nearly breaks him. Until Goggins gets the thing Rick never finds: a moment of tenderness between father and son. 

“I was alone in a room at home, looking out into space. My son, who was 12, asked me, ‘Dad, are you okay?’ And I said, ‘No, man. I’m really not okay. I’m not okay.’ And the tears came. That’s the first time that had ever happened in front of my child. The man that he was — a young man at the time — he came over and hugged me and he said, ‘I love you, and I think you’re the best actor in the world. It’ll be okay.’”

Cut to the final scene that Goggins films. It’s not Rick’s death. It’s the moment of triumph that happens first. Rick Hatchett is in Bangkok, finally face to face with the Six-Fingered Man to his Inigo Montoya, with Scott Glenn as the proverbial Guest. The actor is as iconic to Goggins as he is to anyone, and yet, in this moment, he can’t allow himself to see the legend in his presence. He can only allow himself to be Rick Hatchett, across from Jim Hollinger, an old and bitter man at the end of an old and bitter road. No one can stop Rick from doing whatever it is he’s about to do to his nemesis. But someone at least can stop the actor from going too deep into the character’s dark heart: Sam Rockwell, Goggins’ longtime friend and colleague on The White Lotus. On the other side of their unforgettable Bangkok bar scene, Goggins and Rockwell have an equally profound moment that never gets filmed. 

“He’s wrapped,” Goggins remembers, “and he says to me, ‘Don’t. Let it go. You’ve got a long way to go. Tell them to give you a 20 minute warning before you have to do the scene. You’ve been living with this for seven months now. It’s not good. So let it go. And then just let it happen how it happens. Just let it explode how it’s going to fucking explode.’”

So Goggins does exactly that. He retreats. He waits. He’s warned, and he arrives. He sits across from Glenn, hears “action,” then gives himself all the time in the world to become Rick again. 

“I didn’t say a fucking word for, I’m going to say, two minutes. Didn’t say anything. Mike never cut. I just sat there in this space with this person because …”

At this moment during our interview, Goggins has to pause, because in reliving this moment — and he knows it might sound overly dramatic — but it’s the moment of transcendence, where actor and character truly become one. 

“It’s going to sound so fucking weird,” he says at last. “But I didn’t want it to end there. You know what I mean? I’m thinking, I won’t have him as my villain anymore after this conversation is over, because I’m going to kill this motherfucker. And so, it was that moment you want as an actor. Actors, we want that moment of sublime, where you see between the spaces, and you access the silence in between, which is Nirvana; that’s heaven, that’s spirituality, that’s God. And I’ve had that a few times over the course of my career, but it doesn’t happen that often for anyone really. And in that moment, I got it.

“I sat for the longest time, and then I looked at [Glenn] and I think the first thing I said was, ‘I’ve been following you for a very long time. I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time.’ And Scott just sat there in it, sat there in that fucking silence. What do these two people have to fucking say to each other? They don’t even know each other. He doesn’t know me at all yet, and I don’t know him, but I feel like I know everything about him. And it was so spontaneous. It’s so freeing and so volatile at the same moment. And then the conversation kind of began in earnest, and it’s one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever had in my life as an artist. That conversation and how that conversation ended, the things that I said to him were a little bit longer. And on the day, Mike instigated it. We cut some of what I said to him, because it was really just looking at this person who was a lion in my mind, who was responsible for a life of pain, who was this God in some ways, who ultimately became just insignificant. That person where, once you face it, you just think, ‘Why? I wasted my entire fucking life worried about the old man behind the curtain.’ And so then, he’s free.”

But the story doesn’t end there for Rick. And even though it’s the last scene he films, the story of Rick doesn’t end there for Goggins, either. Because then the press tour begins, and then the show airs. Now awards season heats up, and here we are. And even when Emmy night wraps on Sept. 14, Goggins will never quite bury Rick Hatchett. He knows this because he hasn’t fully buried Shane or Justified‘s Boyd Crowder or any of the other number of extraordinary figures he’s lent his talent toward realizing. 

A few hours before our interview, Goggins was sitting down for a different press opportunity altogether. He was watching scenes from across his career, some of them for the first time in decades. These shows are over. Many of these characters are dead. And yet, they are all as alive as Rick Hatchett on the final night Goggins wore his skin. 

“Im watching the scenes. But I’m not just thinking about the scenes,” he says. “I’m thinking about the moments in between. It’s about the experience of that day, about the days leading up to that day and the days after that day. I’m thinking about what happened in my life between this job, this job, this job and this job. It’s all wrapped up. There are needle points, and there’s a lot of thread in between.”

Goggins considers the needle points and sits again in the silence.

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s a lot of thread in between.”