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Walton Goggins Answers The Web's Most Searched Questions

Walton Goggins joins WIRED to answer his most searched questions from Google. What can he reveal about working on season 3 of The White Lotus? How well can he sing? Is he the bad guy in Fallout? The actor answers all these questions and more!

Fallout and I'm A Virgo are available to stream exclusively on Prime Video.

Director: Justin Wolfson
Director of Photography: AJ Young
Editor: Boris Khaykin
Talent: Walton Goggins
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Talent Booker: Mica Medoff
Camera Operator: Shay Eberle-Gunst
Sound Mixer: Kari Barber
Production Assistant: Fernando Barajas
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Jason Malizia

Released on 06/12/2024

Transcript

So sorry.

Is this seat taken?

Okay, thank you.

Table for one, right?

Hello, I'm Walton Goggins

and this is the Wired Auto Complete Interview.

[upbeat music]

Okay.

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Where did Walton Goggins grow up?

I grew up in a little bitty town called Lithia Springs,

which is about 20 minutes outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

It's a beautiful little town.

It only had one stop sign

and nobody else is from there but me.

Does Walton Goggins really have a southern accent?

I do have a Southern accent, you know,

because I'm from the south,

so I speak like the other people speak that I grew up with.

I can change it.

I can't really do many accents.

I mean, I can do Southern accent

and I can just do one

that has just a slight southern accent to it.

That's about it.

It's the only range I have.

Walton Goggins looks like Jim Morrison.

Thank you.

Really?

Jim Morrison if he had teeth this big, I'll take it.

Last one.

Walton Goggins photography.

Oh, I like taking photos.

I like traveling and I like taking pictures of the people

that I meet along the way.

So photography for me is a really big deal.

It's the way I document my experiences.

Check this out.

Next.

This guy, is he in the union?

What is Walton Goggins best known for?

Well, depends on who you ask, right?

I like to think clogging, but most people would disagree.

Maybe The Hateful Eight.

Maybe The Shield, may be Justified,

maybe Vice Principals,

maybe The Righteous Gemstones.

But right now, it's for Fallout.

Okay.

Walton Goggins upcoming projects.

Fallout season two.

Oh, and I am currently doing the White Lotus season three.

How about that?

Unbelievable.

We're filming it down in Thailand.

Walton Goggins, Quentin Tarantino.

Oh, how about that?

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 favorite filmmaker.

Living or deceased.

Thank God he's still living, my favorite.

Okay, Walton Goggins western movies.

I've been in a few of those.

I love western movies.

I love watching western movies.

My son was 11 years old when we really started

introducing him to a lot of different films.

And the western genre was the first one

that we started with.

Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,

Rio Bravo, Stagecoach, and all the rest of them.

And he loves the westerns as much as I do.

Sergio Leone, I love you.

Oh, one fan fact.

Ennio Morricone,

you know the great guy who won the Academy Award,

who did all of Leone's films?

I got to record with him at Abbey Road in London.

How about that?

Can Walton Goggins sing?

You know, the greatest compliment I've ever been given,

true story, was Walton Goggins can sing

well enough to believe that he would never

make it as a singer.

True story.

Can Walton Goggins clog?

Yeah.

If this was a full shot, I would clog for you here,

but it's not.

So I can't.

Just trust that these feet were made for clogging.

'Cause my mother was a clogger

and she got me into a clogging class.

Believe it or not.

That was a thing in Lithia Springs, Georgia, where I'm from.

And she did it because my mom loves to dance

and she wanted me to dance with her.

So I learned how to clog, but I also learned how to bop

and bopping is the Florida version

of the North Carolina shag.

It's super cool.

You know what else my mom taught me

that's not on this list?

She taught me how to two step

and I'm a mean two stepper.

Walton Goggins Misbehavin.

Yes, this is a song that I sang with Jennifer Nettles

in season one of The Righteous Gemstones.

The thing that I had going for me was singing it

with Jennifer Nettles.

They boosted all of the lines that she sang

and they brought all the lines that I sang down.

You know what?

Maybe you know this lyric?

Running through the house with a pickle in my mouth.

Thank you.

Wow.

God, you should do this for a living.

It's extraordinary.

Is Walton Goggins a bad guy in Fallout?

Oh, a great, great question.

The thing that I love about doing Fallout so much,

it was architected in a way that the antagonist

becomes the protagonist

that may also become the antagonist again.

And I would say that that applies

to everybody that's in the show.

It takes a lot of energy to survive in the wasteland.

And sometimes you gotta be a good guy

and sometimes you gotta be a bad guy.

Is Walton Goggins a nice guy?

[beep], yes, I am.

I'm the nicest guy.

Where's the next [beep] card, man?

Just kidding.

Can I cuss?

I don't even know if I can cuss.

Okay, is Walton Goggins...

Wow, this is a long piece of tape.

This is scaring me.

Coming back to Justified.

I would absolutely love to come back to Justified.

So would Tim Olyphant,

and I know FX would like to have Justified

back on the air.

It's just a matter of timing.

Next card.

[beep], man.

Thank God you're not in the union.

When does Walton Goggins

appear in Righteous Gemstones?

Oh, okay, that's a very good question.

Episode three, season one.

And I appear in The Righteous Gemstones

in a bathtub for the very first time.

And I stand up and I am naked in that bathtub.

It wasn't my actual body and it wasn't my anatomy.

It was a 78-year-old stand-in

that they flew in from Chicago.

I got a call after the first...

That episode appeared,

and a really good friend of mine said,

my God, your body looks so good, Walton.

What?

It's not my body.

That's a 78-year-old stand-in.

Next.

Walton Goggins, Vice Principals.

Mm hmm.

That was literally one of the greatest

experiences of my life, honest to check.

Walton Goggins on The Shield.

Let's segue into a drama.

Again, another one of the greatest experiences of my life.

We filmed it in Los Angeles.

Michael Chiklis and Kenny Johnson

are still some of my best friends today.

We did The Shield over seven years.

It totaled 84 hours of television.

The Sopranos were on at the same time that we were.

But no one, no actor had been given the opportunity

to play the same character in a serialized format

for 84 hours.

We had no idea that we were astronauts

kind of in this world, if you will.

And when we shot the pilot,

no one had any idea that seven years later

we would be ending this story,

having explored every aspect

of their psychology, if you will.

It was and will remain

one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Next.

Thank you.

Walton Goggins.

Hey, I know him.

Walton Goggins, Venus Van Dam.

Oh, now this is my girl, Venus Van Dam.

Kurt Sutter, the writer of Sons of Anarchy,

was one of the main writers on The Shield,

a very, very dear friend of mine.

And the truth is, this is a true story.

He did an an interview where he said that

the only two people that I could never have on my show

are Michael Chiklis and Walton Goggins,

because no one could ever see them as anything

but their characters on The Shield.

Someone sent this article to me, I read it,

I forwarded it to Kurt Sutter.

And I said, you, [beep] you, man.

I wouldn't do your show anyway.

True story.

I said, the only way that I would do your show

is if I played a transgender.

Two years later, he sent me a text

and he said, were you serious?

And I said, about what?

He said, about playing a transgender.

And I said, do you have pages?

He said, yes.

He sent them.

I read them and it was one of the greatest things

that I had ever read.

And it made me laugh and it broke my heart.

And so I bought a pair of high heels

while we were doing Django Unchained.

And I walked the streets of New Orleans

after wrap at like midnight every night

for the better part of a month, just to get used to it.

If you can walk on high heels on cobblestone streets,

you could walk in them anywhere.

I don't feel like I did that show

because it took four and a half hours to get made up.

I would come very early in the morning

and no one outta respect for me

and deference to Venus,

no one ever saw that transition

except the people that were working on it.

Charlie and Kim and all the boys on the show

only ever met me as Venus Van Dam.

We had been friends for years before that,

but they never talked to me as Walton.

They only referred to me as Venus.

And they treated me like the lady that I was.

It will remain one of the...

Also one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Walton Goggins, White Lotus.

Let me just say that again.

Walton Goggins, White Lotus, season three,

filming it right now in Thailand.

Mike White has a unique way in which he observes the world.

He is able to articulate

through dialogue an existential crisis of people

that is applicable to people from all walks of life,

from all of these different character voices.

And the thing about Mike White,

which not a lot of people know outside of the business,

is he writes all of it.

He does it all himself.

Okay, Walton Goggins, Shanghai Noon.

Yeah, I did that.

There was a time in my life where I...

I don't know if I manifested it,

but I just kind of concentrated on people

that I wanted to work with.

And it started with Robert Duvall

and I did The Apostle with Robert Duvall.

About four months after I spent obsessing over

the fact that I wanted to work with Robert Duvall.

Owen Wilson?

I did the same thing.

Bottle Rocket was one of my favorite movies

and remains this day to be one of my favorite movies.

And Owen was the guy that I really wanted to work with.

Lo and behold, I got a call to come in

and meet with Tom Dey, the director,

and got the role of this movie with Owen

and we became friends over the course of making it.

And he is everything that I hoped he would be.

It was a great experience.

Watch this.

Well, that's it.

We're out of boards.

I've never really thought about questions

that people ask when they Google my name,

but this has been illuminating in many, many ways.

I hope that this satiates your curiosity.

Thank you very much for Googling me.

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