How Walton Goggins won an Oscar without technically winning an Oscar: “It was pretty incredible”
If you don’t know much about Walton Goggins, and he is one of those actors who has been around for ages but seemingly usually in the background of stuff, then it’s likely you’ll have seen him in one of two things lately, the Prime Video nuclear hit Fallout, or a seemingly enormous amount of adverts.
Goggins is definitely making hay while the sun shines and putting his name to all manner of products, and who can blame him – after all, he is having ‘a moment’ as Gen Z like to say, and he has certainly put a shift in, having been involved in well over 100 different films and TV shows as far back as 1990.
It isn’t that he hasn’t been successful, or that people weren’t hiring him – in fact, his CV is genuinely impressive, encompassing two Quentin Tarantino movies, a Marvel film and Spielberg’s Lincoln, but it’s probably on the small screen that he has done his best work, and certainly since the Timothy Olyphant-starring western series Justified was a big success.
That led him to two recent roles that have shot him into the spotlight, the previously mentioned Fallout, the video game adaptation with Ella Purnell that has proved hugely popular and not long finished a second season, and stylish far-flung drama The White Lotus, which Goggins joined for its third season.
A sign of the kind of performances Goggins has put in over the last few years is that he was nominated for Emmy Awards for all three of those shows, his first major industry award nods since he was nominated for a guest appearance on the biker show Sons of Anarchy ten years earlier.
He is yet to land an Academy Award nomination, although he argues that point, because right back in the day, he was involved in a short film from 2001 called The Accountant (not the Ben Affleck one), which scooped ‘Best Live Action Short Film’ at the following year’s Oscar ceremony.
Goggins, who starred in and produced the dark comedy, explained to Business Insider, “It was myself, and my two partners, Ray McKinnon and Lisa Blount, who has since passed away. And in the short film category, you can only put two names down for the award, so it was Ray and Lisa, but we all did it together, so we all decided we’d walk up on stage. And we timed our speech so we all could talk in 30 seconds and not piss anyone off.”
He added, “It came from the heart, and it brought the house down. And that’s hard to do after Sidney Poitier just got his lifetime achievement award. It was pretty incredible.”
Goggins got to keep one of the famed golden statuettes, but the way his career is going recently, he may well end up winning one for his acting to go with it soon. He’s currently filming a new movie in Spain with Chloë Grace Moretz called Mister, and he’s also wrapped on an action film named Painter, about a young girl who is trained to fight by her father, who then gets kidnapped, needing her to rescue him.
