Walton Goggins, They Could Never Make Me Hate You, Even When You’re Playing A Total Prick in ‘The White Lotus’

He smokes a cigarette annoyingly near other passengers. When one asks if he can move away from them, it nearly turns into a physical fight. Arriving at a stunningly picturesque Thai wellness resort, he curtly refuses the welcome gift of a phuang malai. When he stops seething long enough to address his cheerful young girlfriend, it’s to order her to stop talking, or to cut off her questions by telling her she’s “like a fucking machine gun.” Rick Hackett, in the third season of The White Lotus, is definitely a jerk. But it’s almost impossible to dislike him, because he is played by Walton Goggins.

It feels like Goggins has always been with us, such an indelibly cool motherfucker that he can pull off namesake Goggle Glasses that would make any other person look ridiculous (and that, though you might suspect he’d lent his name to them as a bit, he apparently sincerely believes in, or does he?). But it took a while for the industry to catch on: his major role as Shane in the anti-copaganda cop show The Shield came a decade after this commentator first saw him cheesing at a college party in Beverly Hills, 90210.

While The Shield had its fans, its moral complications kept it just a cult sensation. It was also a stepping stone on the way to Goggins’ breakout role in Justified. Officially, the protagonist of Justified is U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), an ex-coalminer from Kentucky who went into law enforcement maybe mostly to spite his father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry), a frequent associate of the Dixie Mafia-connected Crowder family in Raylan’s native Harlan. But Boyd (Goggins), of the Crowder family’s rising new generation, makes it a two-hander with Raylan: Sure, they’re on opposite sides of the law, but they “dug coal together,” bonding them for life. 

There’s certainly a version of Boyd — the latest in a long line of local criminals, who’s just been released from prison with renewed Christian faith and white supremacist ideals — who doesn’t make much impact in a show full of hardened psychopaths and ill-starred morons. But that’s not how Goggins played the character, which is why producers had to reshoot the original pilot that ended with Boyd’s death. And thank god they did, or we never would have learned that Boyd’s dream is to own his own Dairy Queen franchise, and he’s not too fussy about how it happens.

Vice Principals stars Goggins and Danny McBride (also a co-creator) as former high school faculty rivals who join forces to take down the outside hire they feel snaked the principal job each thought he was entitled to. It’s another The Shield: treasured by its relatively small fandom; part of a pathway to a bigger success — specifically, The Righteous Gemstones. McBride’s Vice Principals follow-up revolves around the titular family of TV evangelists and entrepreneurs. When we meet them, the Gemstones — father Eli (John Goodman) and his adult children Jesse (McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson), and Kelvin (Adam DeVine) — are still recovering from the death of Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), the Gemstone matriarch. Eli has a lot on his mind, from the pain of his bereavement to the question of who will succeed him whenever he decides to retire to how to get rid of Aimee-Leigh’s no-account brother Billy (Goggins).

Before she was the First Lady of a wildly prosperous megachurch, Aimee-Leigh was part of a musical double act with her younger brother, known then as Baby Billy, which is why her children still call him Uncle Baby Billy in his white-haired adulthood. Detestable and venal as the Gemstone kids can be, Uncle Baby Billy is worse, and the smartest thing the show’s producers did was introduce him after the first few episodes so that we could root for his niece and nephews and against him.

Goggins’s other post-Justified sitcom had a completely different tone. In The Unicorn, Goggins plays Wade, a recently widowed father of two teen girls. When he decides to try re-entering the dating pool, he discovers he is a unicorn: a man prospective love matches know can commit to a woman, and who hasn’t learned bad dating habits from the apps that launched while he was happily married.

Looking at a script that calls for a nice, normal, good-natured suburban dad and deciding Walton Goggins is your guy feels like overkill as long as Kyle Bornheimer draws breath. But after his more intense roles, Goggins is certainly entitled to a role that mostly lets him chill on pleasant dates with age-appropriate women, and it’s a shame that this unfairly forgotten adult hangout sitcom only ran for two seasons.

Goggins went on to Boots Riley’s provocative dramedy I’m A Virgo, playing Jay Whittle, a billionaire who works part-time as a costumed (but not masked) vigilante known simply as The Hero. When a local activist in the show’s hallucinatory version of Oakland explains to him how capitalism destroys communities and funnels disadvantaged people into the carceral state, The Hero rethinks his entire life and belief system. The show aired on Jeff Bezos’s Prime Video platform; presumably Bezos doesn’t know that.

Goggins’ next Prime Video original show was last summer’s post-apocalyptic dramedy Fallout. After The Unicorn and The Hero, Goggins plays The Ghoul, a mutant bounty hunter with a hole in his face where his nose used to be — though this phase of his life may be less morally compromised than when he was a movie star named Cooper Howard who used his fame to promote the company that drove humanity into underground bunkers known as vaults. 

The White Lotus’ Rick isn’t as villainous as Goggins’ other recent characters, but maybe that’s just because he also isn’t as ambitious. We don’t know much about Rick: He describes his work as doing “a little of this, a little of that.” Whatever that means, a consequence of his having done it means he can’t risk visiting Australia anymore. He doesn’t have any interest in the resort’s spa treatments — the main draw for its other guests — but he did choose this particular spot for a reason that becomes clear midway through the season. Amid his secretive stewing, he grudgingly submits to a session with a stress-management specialist. There, he opens up far more to his therapist than he does to Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), the doting girlfriend he dismisses, disregards and nearly drives into the arms of a pair of feckless brothers visiting the hotel from North Carolina. It’s not overstating matters to say Rick has less care for Chelsea than he does for the reptiles imprisoned for a poorly managed local snake show.

After Rick ditches her their first night at The White Lotus, Chelsea makes friends with Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon), another beautiful young woman dating a much older guy. At the bar, they commiserate about managing the moods of rich bald men, of which Chloe — who lives on the island full-time, in her boyfriend’s mansion — says there are so many they’re known as LBHes: “Losers Back Home.” Chelsea isn’t as contemptuous of Rick as Chloe is of her LBH (though she does admit Rick is going bald), and even though I probably should be, I’m not either. He’s still played by Walton Goggins, and I would probably put up with a lot for the promise of earning a smile from him, too.