THE BEAUTIFUL, WILD CHAOS OF WALTON'S WORLD

The star on the whirlwind that was The White Lotus, meeting his former self on set, his unlikely road to fame — and being a “spouse baby” in his wife’s new film

- INTERVIEW BY LAURA MARTIN

I don't know if we come back here again,” Walton Goggins ponders of life on Earth, every bit the philosophical, low-buttoned shirt-wearing dude we have come to love. “I don’t know anything, none of us really do, right? The only thing that we have control over is our participation in the world around us, and I try to lean into those things.”

Leaning in seems to be Goggin’s natural sensibility, but that’s not easy when you're in the eye of a hurricane. The past 18 months have seen the cult actor hit stratospheric heights, appearing in several huge TV hits; the biggest of all being, of course, pop culture juggernaut, The White Lotus.

“I’m thinking of the right words to describe it...” he says in his familiar Southern drawl, from a hotel room in LA. “Wonderfully chaotic!

It certainly has been. Mike White's third series of the millionaires-on-holiday murder mystery was the most tragic so far, with the fateful tale of two lovers at its heart: a lone wolf with abandonment issues, Rick Hatchett (Goggins), and his besotted younger girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). No spoilers, but it ended up as one of the most heartbreaking stories of the season.

The show pulled in an average of 16 million viewers each episode, but fans soon began to turn their feverish attentions to the actors off-screen, especially after cast mate Jason Isaacs talked about the intense filming of the show in Thailand. All the cast lived at the hotel where the show was filmed, for months, and Isaacs said: “Some people got very close, there were friendships that were made and friendships that were lost.” And so ignited much online speculation about the cast, particularly whether an assumed once-close Goggins and Wood had fallen out.