How Walton Goggins became the most reliable character actor in the business
Character actors are the unsung heroes of the profession, the performers who very rarely have their name plastered front-and-centre in the marketing, but refuse to take it personally. If anything, they seize it as an opportunity to elevate anything they’re in, which is what helped make Walton Goggins the most reliable practitioner the industry has at its disposal.
There are plenty of names from the past and present of Hollywood that can always be relied on to knock a performance out of the park regardless of how big or small the part is, and Goggins has firmly established himself as among that number. Very rarely will he be the top-billed name in the ensemble, but on most occasions, he’ll be the highlight.
Born and raised in Alabama, possessing a wild hairdo, and boasting a set of teeth so pearly white they’re almost unsettling, it would have been easy for Goggins to be typecast as a redneck from the second he got his foot in the door. It’s something he alluded to by admitting that before securing his breakthrough role in small screen classic The Shield, most of the offers coming his way were for characters along the lines of ‘Redneck #1’.
The complex and conflicted Los Angeles detective Shane Vendrell in Shawn Ryan’s groundbreaking police drama was his first-ever recurring gig on television, before he found an even better one as the antagonistic Boyd Crowder on Justified. Initially set to be killed off at the end of the pilot, Goggins stuck around for the whole six seasons and established what would soon become his signature style.
“I don’t know what came first, the chicken or the egg. I never really think about flourishing dialogue. I just think about the quality of dialogue I’ve gotten to say,” he told Rolling Stone. “I’ve gotten a reputation for maybe making sense out of taking 10 minutes to say something that you could have said in 30 seconds, and this is no different.”
His ability to deliver loquacious monologues with everything from unwavering charisma to searing menace soon opened up plenty more doors, with Quentin Tarantino so impressed with his constant monologuing in Justified that he cast Goggins in both Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Very rarely will he play the same sort of character twice, but he’ll always steal the show.
A guest spot as Venus Van Dam in Sons of Anarchy may not hold up under modern scrutiny, but his commitment can’t be faulted. He was a riot in the raucous HBO comedy Vice Principals, devours the scenery whole every time he’s on-screen as Billy Freeman in The Righteous Gemstones, projected entrepreneurial menace in Boots Riley’s offbeat superhero twist I’m a Virgo, and channelled the spirit of Clint Eastwood while caked under heavy makeup and prosthetics as The Ghoul in Prime Video’s hit video game adaptation Fallout.
Next up on the small screen is the next season of The White Lotus, and for anyone following Goggins’ remarkable trajectory of consistency, he’s guaranteed to be one of the best things about the returning favourite. A career-defining movie role has so far remained just out of his reach, but when the mention of his name alone is about as close to a guarantee of quality as it gets, there’s no shame in continuing to play second, third, or even fourth fiddle when he’s so effortlessly excellent at it.
