Walton Goggins names his favourite director of all time: “Living or deceased”
Walton Goggins has been a pretty unavoidable presence on our screens over the past few years.
If you’ve not seen him being the flamboyant orange-skinned Baby Billy in The Righteous Gemstones, then you might be more familiar with him holidaying on The White Lotus or navigating a post-apocalyptic landscape as a ghoul in Fallout.
It seems like the actor has quite the monopoly on television at the moment, but he’s popped up in his fair share of popular movies, too. Appearing in everything from the cult classic House of 1000 Corpses by Rob Zombie to Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning biopic Lincoln, Goggins clearly believes in variety, never boxing himself into a corner.
During his career, he has been lucky enough to work with a filmmaker he considers his all-time favourite, which is something that not every actor has the privilege of saying. While many stars never get the chance to work with their favourite directors, perhaps they’re long-dead or just too out of reach, some are able to form friendships with the filmmakers they love the most, which is something that Goggins can proudly boast.
Following his role in Lincoln, the actor landed the part of Billy Crash in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist western, which takes a pretty violent look at race in the Old West, with Jamie Foxx starring as the titular character. Goggins was so excited to be working with Tarantino because not only was this a big role for him, but he also considers him his all-time favourite director.
Tarantino started making films in the late 1980s while working at a Video Archives store, shifting VHS tapes to eager Californian movie lovers with whom he would converse about cinema to his heart’s content. This time was pivotal in shaping his love of movies, and soon he was able to finance his first proper feature, which would become 1992’s Reservoir Dogs.
The indie movie became a hit, and Tarantino was quickly classed as one of the coolest ones to watch; with his knack for blending violence with style (and plenty of witty dialogue), he had what it took to carve out a new landscape for American cinema. After penning movies like Natural Born Killers and True Romance, both of which presented a rather romanticised vision of an America doused in bloodshed, he made yet another popular hit, Pulp Fiction. Thus, it’s not hard to see how Goggins fell in love with Tarantino’s work as a young, budding actor in the ‘90s.
Eventually, his dream of working with the filmmaker came true, and then fate was in his favour again when he was invited to star in another Tarantino movie a few years later, appearing as Captain Chris Mannix in the filmmaker’s other western, The Hateful Eight, which was similarly acclaimed; Goggins couldn’t believe his luck.
Discussing his love for the director, he told Wired, rather oddly, since he really wasn’t young when Tarantino became famous, “When I was a little kid, I never thought I would see this name next to this name. I worked with Quentin two times on Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. And he is my favourite filmmaker. Living or deceased.”
“Thank God he’s still living, my favourite,” he added for emphasis, and perhaps Tarantino can spare Goggins a part in his final movie, that’s if the filmmaker can actually make up his mind about it.
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