The only actor who left Walton Goggins speechless: “My lovely brush with greatness”
If there was ever a name for those actors who aren’t big stars but are reliably great in everything they’re in, the ones who you don’t think about all that often until they pop up on screen, then it’s Walton Goggins.
Considering he has such a distinctive look, the Alabama-born performer is a brilliant character actor and consistently appears in great TV shows and movies without ever cracking that upper echelon of fame, and he also has one of the best names of anyone ever.
Since he began his career in the late 1980s, Goggins has rubbed shoulders with some of the all-time greats, with his first film role an uncredited appearance in 1992’s Mr Saturday Night, which brought him into the orbit of the likes of Billy Crystal and Helen Hunt. His recent spate of high-profile TV appearances has seen him share the screen with Jessica Chastain, Jason Isaacs, Kyle MacLachlan, and many others; if you can think of a famous actor, chances are Goggins has their phone number.
All things considered, you wouldn’t expect Goggins to get starstruck very easily, but, as he explained to The Irish Times, it happened to him while at the Golden Globes with the rest of the cast of the TV show The Shield.
“I met Daniel Day-Lewis,” he revealed, “I saw him and said, ‘Oh my God, you guys, I’m walking up’. And he looked at me with those intense eyes and said, ‘I know you. You’re Walton Goggins. The Apostle is one of my favourite movies’. I was speechless. So that was my lovely brush with greatness.”
Through the powers of deduction (and Wikipedia), I think that this exchange happened at the 2003 edition of Hollywood’s most pointless awards show, where The Shield, a show about a group of corrupt police officers, took home two prizes, ‘Best Television Series – Drama’ and ‘Best Actor – Television Series Drama’ for Michael Chiklis, and Day-Lewis was up for the corresponding award for film for his performance in Gangs of New York, but lost out to Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt.
The Apostle was one of the first films to feature Goggins in a substantial role, and it also stars Robert Duvall (who also served as director) as Texas preacher Euliss ‘Sonny’ Dewey, who is forced to flee his congregation after he accidentally kills the man having an affair with his wife.
He moves to Louisiana, where his charismatic radio sermons attract an audience, but his past threatens to catch up with him. Goggins plays Sam, a local mechanic and member of Sonny’s flock, and he spoke very highly of working with Duvall, paying an emotional tribute to him when he died in 2026.
There’s something about Daniel Day-Lewis that puts him in a category all of his own. He is a real actor’s actor, someone who takes the craft to an entirely new level, and it’s nice to know that, even when you’re as famous as Walton Goggins, you can still feel the magic of Hollywood from time to time.
