Walton Goggins on Rick’s Showdown with Jim

Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for season 3, episode 7 of “The White Lotus‘Now streamed on Max.

One of the most important conflicts in this season of “The White Lotus” – a conflict that a party did not even know – has finally reached a peak.

Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) came to the White Lotus in Thailand to confront and kill Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), who owns the hotel with his wife, Sitala (Lek Patravadi); When he heard that Jim was admitted to Bangkok after a stroke in the hospital, Rick left his girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood) in the hotel to finally take revenge. Rick believes that his father was murdered by Jim, based on something his mother said to him before she died. He never met his father, and that absence, like the threatening, imagined presence of Jim, has hung all his life.

So did he kill Jim? Well, no. After he entered Jim’s house as part of a list for which he hired his shady former employee, Frank (Sam Rockwell), Rick Jim got alone and confronted him, he finally decided to beat the chair that Jim sat, pushed him to the ground, instead of shooting him. Rick will prepare this penultimate episode of the season for new revelations: as Goggins says, Rick has, after he has now pursued the “Bogeyman” who has pursued his mind since his youth, “experienced a release of 53 years of pain”. Rick’s role in the episode ends with a Late-Night Rager, as Rick and Frank Party with women and drugs; Surrounded by debauchery, Rick sits on a couch, not participating and yet euphoric, his smile a proof of what he has achieved, even without pulling blood.

It is an emotional journey in the course of a single episode. And Goggins, who had not talked about it with someone since photographing, is both animated and tearing during the discussion, especially because he remembers the months of anticipating the nemesis of his character – with cautious anticipation that Rick freed himself from his anger.

Goggins, a TV veteran with credits ranging from “justified” to “Fallout”, said with Variety Prior to the broadcast of episode 7 to discuss what was needed to arouse that smile, work together with maker Mike White, why critics of Rick’s relationship with Chelsea are “damn boring” – and what it was like to shoot the most viral scene of the season vis -à -vis his good friend Rocwell.

How long did it take before you see your confrontation with the character of Scott Glenn? Was it all in one night?

I think it is important to understand that I read all these scripts quite early. I don’t know if I was the first to be hired, but I was pretty close to it. And I almost read the scripts as Mike wrote, in a fever dream – in the course of a flight from LA to New York and then directly to my apartment, so that they were all completed in one night. When I arrived at this episode, I knew it was going there – this last confrontation with this man who defined my life. It was my own Mount Everest – my own Apocalypse. It would take so long to reach the smile he has at the end of the show.

We’ll get there.

To answer your question, so that you can contextualize how long I was with this, what the majority of nine months was, we did that confrontation during one night. It was half the night – we had filmed something during the day – and I will never forget it. I was personally in such a state, and Sam worked with me and I felt so comfortable with him. I really needed him. He saw the state in which I sat and he said: “You are okay, size. You can let this go. The only thing you have to ask is a head of 20 minutes. These were very wise words of a precious friend.

I just asked for a 20-minute head-up before we started. I’m going on this [in character] Do not know if I will kill this guy or beat the shit from him, and then it turns out that I just kick him in a chair, because that is really all he deserved. All the strength he had about me was taken back by me at that time and I saw him for whom he was.

Was what you were overwhelming at the moment that you had been in mind with this one scene for months, built up with anticipation?

It got close to home for me at a number of levels, just as it would do for everyone – everyone who had trauma in our lives. That was the night that I, Walton Goggins, played Rick Hatchett, confronted Scott Glenn and played Jim Hollinger. So yes – the bubble was ready to burst. Something would happen. You do this for that. It was the expectation for a period of nine months to have this conversation and not to know exactly where it would lead.

It is so interesting to hear this in the context of the episode, because Rick and Frank enter the house, the character of Sam is as calm as it can be while you are practically paralyzed.

Frank has no history with this. He does me a favor as a friend. I told him off-camera what this meant for me. These are two people you think they are unable to intimacy that are more intimate and vulnerable than anyone in the damn ‘white lotus’. That is so ironic about the relationship between these two men.

What I have arrived – if you can imagine that your entire life is determined by a single event, your next trip has been a response to this story that has defined your life. The person responsible for writing the script where I play in the lead is suddenly straightforward. To use a religious metaphor, is the Vatican real, if you are a Catholic, until you stand in front of it and you have awe? This is my opponent, but he is also the damn hero. He’s all. He is a bogeyman who was so much in the spirit of Rick Hatchett that it took me a moment to fully understand that this person really exists, and I stand for him. That was what it was for me.

That makes it so interesting that Rick decides not to kill him when he has a clear chance.

I am now shaking about it now. I haven’t thought about it for a long time. At the end of episode 6 stepped off the boat and see him through Rick’s eyes for the first time – I remember that I was sitting there on the other side, looked at the functions on his face and continues every moment that this person has been in the damn room for 53 years. How was his life? What did he do when I photographed damn heroin when I sniffed cocaine from a whore’s ass? Did he eat? This man has a beautiful life – he has created something beautiful. It is Stockholm’s syndrome – who am I without him?

Especially considering that your character has never known his father – this is an older, established man and someone who has defined his life.

Precisely. Both in [his life] Psychological, spiritual, but absent, physically. We have only done the scene three times. And after the second version I said, “Can we just go right away?” Everyone hurried and went back to it again, and it was one of those moments that we all live for, to really believe that this happened. I wanted him to hear what I had to say – and I don’t know if it was his inability to remember or understand, but my struggles never came up with him.

While he has been everything for you.

Yes, and if he walks around the table, it’s just … “You are a vulnerable old man. What power do you really have? You are pathetic, and I wasted my life for someone you never thought of.” Suddenly there is no bogeyman. When you open all doors, there is no cupboard in which a bogeyman can hide. Everything he had worn, it left his body and was gone. It felt like that, walking out of the damn room – the weight of nine months was removed from me. The peace that has just entered into his life, it is such a strange feeling for him.

So far he has had Chelsea, who is completely dedicated to him, and is not hard for Rick, but as a partner he stinks. He is too connected to recognize or see her.

I heard that, and that’s just boring. What I mean by that is that you see their relationship when Mike decided to write the story, right? So that’s not fair. I have not treated her for three years. We had a great time and have hung around and did abundant amounts of drugs, and had a lot of fun. It has sometimes been corrosive, but there is an unmistakable, deep, in -depth soulmate quality in their experience, and they love each other and are very in love with each other, or Rick can transfer it at the moment because he is obsessed with this person who has defined his whole existence.

You have this person who is obsessed and unable to rewrite his story – he has fallen in love with the story of his life because everyone needs an identity. And then you have this person who tells him that you can rise above it, and I love you for who you are. It’s really a nice thing.

I thought the scene in episode 5 in which the character of Sam Rockwell awe is awe about his sexual desires, a really impressive two-hazer, because a very competent actor is needed to listen and be present. How was that to shoot?

Sam is one of my best friends, and the chance to go through this experience with him was a dream come true. We had done one thing the day before, but [the next day] It was our first, and you have two people who love each other and trust each other – there is no barrier. There is nothing that you stop from real vulnerability. The first words we spoke, it’s like: “I have you. Go anywhere you want.” And I mean that, because there are some iterations of that story, and there are a number of ways to listen to that story. It was steeped in confidence and love that is unspoken. Once you feel that with someone, you never have to talk about it. It’s just there.

Well, it was a pleasure, but we are on time, so I should let you go –

We have to come to the smile, man! Take me through your experience if you didn’t know what will happen.

See how Rick Jim knocked down instead of killing him, I thought Rick would be disappointed – that he would have the feeling that it was the right thing to do, but he didn’t get that catharsis. And I was wrong! Because I saw him running out of it like a schoolboy, he looks like a child again, what exactly your point is. He can live again all his life, freed from what he has worn with him.

The way they act together on the street – That Is who Rick is real, right? That is who someone is, on the other side of dealing with trauma. This is a release of 53 years of pain. We did that [camera] Push [on Rick’s smile] Four times, just a matter of doing well. I am sitting there on the couch and it was such an extra -black experience for Rick. It was so deeply spiritual and communicated with God because it was peace and serenity at a level that he has never experienced in his life. Everything he cost to come to that bank on that bank at that time, for everything in the world, for the first time in his life, to be in order.

We have done that damn push four times. There were technical things. And there was one where Mike said, “I have to see more.” I said, “I feel it man, it’s there.” But then, at the last man, I felt that I had shot damn rainbows out of my heart. With the last version I was transparent. And after he said “cut,” Mike said, “You have to come in here and see this, man.” We went back and looked at the monitor – we looked at the last take, and it lands exactly where it lands, and we see exactly what happens from the inside. Everyone started cheering; We have it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.