Walton Goggins breaks down that Sam Rockwell ‘White Lotus’ cameo: “There was a certain amount of anxiety”
There were a lot of attention-grabbing moments in episode five, season three of The White Lotus. There was some brotherly smooching between Saxon and Lochy. Laurie got a bit carried away while partying with the Russians. And Victoria went completely off the deep end when Piper told her she was a Buddhist. However, the biggest talking point to emerge from the episode was Sam Rockwell’s unexpected cameo as Frank, one of Rick’s (Walton Goggins) old buddies.
In the episode, Rick is in Bangkok to settle some unfinished business with the man he believes killed his father, and he goes to an upscale bar to have drinks with his former pal. Frank doesn’t get much screen time, but he provides a riveting monologue about his journey of self-discovery since moving to Thailand that steals the whole episode. It starts with him detailing his voracious sexual appetite and fetish for Asian women and then morphs into his realisation that he is queer and questioning his gender identity.
“Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too?” he muses. “Or inside, could I be an Asian girl? I don’t know. Guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer. Then I realised I’ve got to stop the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl; I got into Buddhism.”
In the days following the episode’s release, Goggins said that he found the monologue deeply moving from the moment he read it in the script. However, he had mixed feelings about Rockwell being the person to deliver it.
“I read [the scene] when I first read all the scripts two or three months before we started filming,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “And I was so blown away by [creator] Mike White and what he has to say about the world and these people, and really all of us, through this monologue. I just read it over and over and over and over and over again.”
Originally, there had been another actor lined up for the part, but when that fell through, Rockwell, who has been in a relationship with actor Leslie Bibb (who plays Kate in the series) for over two decades, was the obvious choice. Goggins found his longstanding friendship with Rockwell to be both a blessing and a curse as their scene approached.
“We did a movie together like 14, 15 years ago [Cowboys & Aliens], and he has been one of my best and dearest friends over the last 15 years of my life,” he told Vanity Fair. “So that is both a positive and a negative in the sense that we haven’t worked together since then. Further complicating this collaboration is that Sam is my hero. He’s really one of the guys in my generation that I look up to, and he knows that. So coming into this experience, there was a certain amount of anxiety, meaning I didn’t want to let my friend down.”
Despite his trepidation, he and Rockwell discussed the scene at length beforehand to ensure it would go off without a hitch. They talked about the characters’ backstories, how they knew each other, and what their relationship symbolised. They did the scene seven or eight times, and he remembered feeling completely at ease with the process. Even now, months later, he is still in awe of the experience.
“I just can’t highlight enough what this particular episode meant to me, not only as an artist but as a friend,” he said. “To see these two people play these two characters that are friends in life, and for it to be about what it’s about and what is being said… It was really one of the greatest opportunities and privileges to get to go through this experience with Sammy Rock.”
It isn’t clear whether Rockwell will return in any of the remaining three episodes, but his scene has already become a peak White Lotus moment that will go down as one of the show’s most memorable strokes of genius.
