Walton Goggins picks his favourite co-star: “It doesn’t get much better than that”
It’s no secret that Walton Goggins and his White Lotus co-star Aimee Lou Wood were highly compatible as colleagues, with plenty of ink spilt over their social media interactions alone, and at least one journalist got to write a pissy article about how Goggins walked out of an interview over his relentless line of salacious questioning.
It was an awkward month-long news cycle that seemed to age the stars by several centuries and make the idea of Hollywood that much more hollow and predatory, so yes, the Rick and Chelsea of it all looms large whenever Goggins’ name is invoked next to the word ‘co-star’.
However, this is a White Lotus-free zone because it turns out that his actual favourite co-star of all time worked with him on a completely different project. Though, to be fair to Wood, the interview in which Goggins discussed this particular colleague took place more than a decade before he appeared in the HBO series, so his answer might be different now.
In a 2008 conversation with the AV Club, Goggins was asked about various movies and TV shows he had worked on, including The Shield, Mr Saturday Night, and Daddy and Them, as well his experience of being in the 1997 film The Apostle, starring Robert Duvall as a Texas preacher who murders his wife’s lover and then absconds to radio evangelising, which was a small part but proved to be massively powerful for him personally.
Having grown up in a family with conservative Baptist roots, Goggins was still wrestling with the seemingly contradictory forces of the darkness and hypocrisy of a preacher and the healing power of religion, which formed the crux of the film and thus, making the movie helped him reach a more solid footing.
“The Apostle gave me the opportunity to realise that while there may be something wrong with the messenger, there’s nothing wrong with the message,” he explained.
Working with Duvall was also a highlight, as both the lead actor and the director of the film, the star was ever-present when Goggins was on set, and the young actor, who was but 24 at the time, soaked up every minute of it.
To be in scenes with him, especially in a movie that was his passion project, was beyond his wildest dreams, about which he remarked, “It doesn’t get much better than that. He’s been number one on my ‘people to look up to’ list for a long time”.
Throughout his career, he’s seen himself as a perpetual underdog, even as he’s become one of the go-to character actors for everyone from Mike White to Quentin Tarantino, always expressing astonishment that certain directors would not only hire him, but seek him out. These days, though, he must be used to it, as after the explosive successes of The White Lotus and The Righteous Gemstones, he’s a legend in his own right.
