Walton Goggins on Rick’s Showdown With Jim

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 7 of “The White Lotus,” now streaming on Max.

One of the key conflicts on this season of “The White Lotus” — a conflict that one party didn’t even know was happening — has finally come to a head. 

Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) came to the White Lotus in Thailand to confront and kill Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), who owns the hotel with his wife, Sritala (Lek Patravadi); upon learning Jim had been hospitalized in Bangkok after a stroke, Rick left his girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood) behind at the hotel in order to finally get revenge. Rick believes that his father was murdered by Jim, based on something his mother said to him before she died. He never met his father, and that absence, as well as the looming, imagined presence of Jim, has hung over his entire life.

So did he kill Jim? Well, no. After entering Jim’s home as part of a ruse for which he enlisted his shady former associate, Frank (Sam Rockwell), Rick got Jim alone and confronted him, ultimately deciding to knock over the chair Jim was sitting in, pushing him to the floor, rather than shooting him. This second-to-last episode of the season sets Rick up for new revelations: As Goggins puts it, Rick, having now dealt with the “bogeyman” who has haunted his mind since childhood, has experienced “a release from 53 years of pain.” Rick’s role in the episode concludes with a late-night rager, as Rick and Frank party with women and drugs; surrounded by debauchery, Rick sits on a sofa, not partaking and yet still euphoric, his smile a testament to just what he achieved, even without drawing blood. 

It’s an emotional journey over the course of a single episode. And Goggins, who until now hadn’t talked about it with anyone since shooting it, grows both animated and tearful during the discussion, particularly as he recalls the months of anticipation of meeting his character’s nemesis — in cautious anticipation of Rick being set free of his anger.

Goggins, a TV veteran with credits ranging from “Justified” to “Fallout,” spoke with Variety ahead of Episode 7’s airing to discuss what it took to elicit that smile, working with creator Mike White, why critics of Rick’s relationship with Chelsea are “fucking boring” — and what it was like to shoot the season’s most viral scene opposite his close friend Rockwell.

How long did it take you to shoot your confrontation with Scott Glenn’s character? Was it all in a single night? 

I think it’s important to understand that I read all of these scripts pretty early. I don’t know if I was the first to be hired, but I was pretty close to it. And I read the scripts almost the way Mike wrote them, in a fever dream — over the course of a flight from L.A. to New York and then straight to my apartment, finishing them all in one night. When I got to this episode, I knew that it was headed there — this final confrontation with this man who defined my life. It was my own Mount Everest — my own apocalypse. It was going to take that long to reach the smile that he has at the end of the show.

We’ll get to that.

To answer your question, so you can contextualize how long I sat with this, which was the better part of nine months, we did that confrontation over one night. It was half of the night — we had been filming something during the day — and I’ll never forget it. I was in such a state, personally, and Sam was working with me, and I felt so comfortable with him. I really needed him. He saw the state I was in, and he said, “You’re OK, buddy. You can let this go. The only thing you need to ask for is a 20-minute head’s up. Just step away from it, because it’s causing you too much pain right now.” These were very wise words from a dear friend. 

I just asked for a 20-minute head’s-up before we started. I’m going into this [in character] not knowing whether or not I’m going to kill this guy or beat the shit out of him, and then it turns out I just kick him over in a chair, because that’s really all he deserved. All of the power that he had over me was taken back by me in that moment, and I saw him for who he was.

Was what was overwhelming you in this moment that you’d been sitting with this one scene in mind for months, building it up with anticipation? 

It hit close to home for me on a number of levels, just like it would for anyone — all of us who have had trauma in our lives. That was the night that I, Walton Goggins, playing Rick Hatchett, got to confront Scott Glenn, playing Jim Hollinger. So, yeah — the bubble was ready to burst. Something was going to happen. That’s what you do this for. It was the anticipation over a nine-month period to have this conversation and not knowing exactly where it would lead.

It’s so interesting hearing this in the context of the episode, because as Rick and Frank enter the house, Sam’s character is as calm as can be, while you’re practically paralyzed.

Frank has no history with this. He’s doing me a favor as a friend. I told him off-camera what this meant to me. These are two people that you think are incapable of intimacy who are more intimate and more vulnerable than anybody else in the fucking “White Lotus.” That’s what’s so ironic about the relationship between these two men. 

What I took it as — if you can imagine your entire life is defined by a singular event, your subsequent journey has been one of reaction to this story that has defined your life. The person responsible for writing the script that I’m starring in is, all of a sudden, right in front of me. To use a religious metaphor, is the Vatican real, if you’re a Catholic, until you stand in front of it, and you are in awe? This is my antagonist, but he’s also the fucking hero. He’s all of it. He’s a bogeyman so outsized in the mind of Rick Hatchett that it took me a moment to fully understand that this person actually does exist, and I’m standing in front of him. That’s what it was for me.

Which makes it so interesting that Rick decides not to kill him, when he has a clear opportunity. 

I’m fucking shaking right now talking about it. I haven’t thought about it in a long time. Getting off the boat at the end of Episode 6, seeing him for the first time through Rick’s eyes — I just remember sitting there transfixed, looking at the features on his face, running through every single moment this person has been in the fucking room with me for 53 years. What was his life like? What was he doing when I was shooting fucking heroin, when I was snorting cocaine off a hooker’s ass? Was he having dinner? This man has a beautiful life — he has created something magnificent. It’s Stockholm syndrome — who am I without him?

Especially given that your character never knew his father — this is an older, established man, and someone who has defined his life.

Exactly. Both in [his life] psychologically, spiritually, but absent, physically. We did the scene only three times. And after the second take, I said, “Can we just go right away?” Everyone hustled and went back to it, and it was one of those moments which we all live for, to really believe this was happening. I wanted him to hear what I had to say — and I don’t know whether it was his inability to remember or to comprehend, but my struggles never crossed his mind.

Whereas he has been everything to you.

Yeah, and when he walks around the table, it’s just… “You’re a frail old man. What power do you really have? You’re pathetic, and I wasted my life for someone that you never even thought about.” Suddenly, there is no bogeyman. If you open all of the doors, there’s no closet a bogeyman can hide in. Everything he had been carrying, it left his body and was gone. It felt that way to me, walking out of the fucking room — the weight of nine months had been lifted off of me. The peace that just entered his life, it’s such a foreign fucking feeling for him. 

Up to this point, he’s had Chelsea, who is totally devoted to him, and not to be harsh to Rick, but as a partner, he stinks. He’s been too tied up to acknowledge her or see her.

I’ve heard that, and that’s just fucking boring. What I mean by that is that you’re seeing their relationship at the moment in which Mike decided to write the story, right? So that’s not fair. I haven’t treated her dismissively for three years. We’ve had a great fucking time, and hung out, and done copious amounts of drugs, and had a lot of fun. It has been caustic at times, but there is an undeniable, deep, profound soulmate quality to their experience, and they love each other and are in love with each other dearly, whether or not Rick can convey it in this moment, because he is obsessed, singularly, with this person that has defined his entire existence. 

You have this person who is obsessed and incapable of rewriting his story — he’s fallen in love with the story of his life, because everybody needs an identity. And then you have this person telling him that you can rise above it, and I love you for who you are. It’s a really beautiful thing. 

I thought the scene in Episode 5 where Sam Rockwell’s character is unburdening himself about his sexual desires was a really impressive two-hander, because it takes a very skilled actor to convey active listening and being present. What was that like to shoot?

Sam is one of my best friends, and the opportunity to go through this experience with him was a dream come true. We had done one thing the day before, but [the next day] it was our first thing, and you have two people that love each other and trust each other — there is no barrier. There is nothing holding you back from true vulnerability. The first words we spoke, it’s like, “I got you. Go wherever you want to go.” And I mean that, because there are a number of iterations of that story, and there are a number of ways to listen to that story. It was infused with trust and love that is unspoken. Once you feel that with someone, you never, ever have to talk about it. It’s just there.

Well, it’s been a pleasure, but we’re at time, so I should let you go—

We have to get to the smile, man! Take me through your experience, when you didn’t know what’s going to happen.

Watching Rick knock Jim down rather than killing him, I thought Rick would end up disappointed — that he would feel like it was the right thing to do, but he didn’t get that catharsis. And I was dead wrong! Because I watched him run out of there like a schoolboy, he looks like a kid again, which is precisely your point. He gets to live his whole life over again, freed from what he’s been carrying with him.

The way that they’re acting together in the street — that is who Rick really is, right? That’s who anyone is, on the other side of dealing with trauma. This is a release from 53 years of pain. We did that [camera] push in [on Rick’s smile] four times, just a matter of getting it right. I’m sitting there on the sofa, and it was such an out-of-body experience for Rick. It was so deeply spiritual and communing with God, because it was peace and serenity on a level that he has never experienced in his life. All it took him to get to that place, in that moment, on that sofa, for everything in the world, for the first time in his life, to be OK. 

We did that fucking push in four times. There were technical things. And there was one where Mike said, “I need to see more.” I said “I feel it man, it’s there.” But then, on the last one, man, I felt like I had goddamn rainbows shooting out of my heart. On that last take, I was translucent. And after he said “cut,” Mike said, “You gotta come in here and see this, man.” We went back and watched the monitor — we watched the last take, and it lands right where it lands, and we see exactly what is going on from the inside out. Everybody started to cheer; we got it. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.