THE OFF-THE-GRID ADVENTURES OF WAKTEN DOGGINS

Thirty years into his career, America's favorite character actor has taken a hard turn into leading-man territory—first on the Amazon megahit Fallout, and now in the wildly anticipated third season of The White Lotus. At home in the Hudson Valley, he explains how his latest role took him to the edge.

- BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS

THE first year of the pandemic, Walton Goggins and his family bought a Mercedes Sprinter van, a 22-footer, and drove across the country in it. They christened it “Vacilando,” a word lifted from Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. Old John says the verb has no precise English equivalent, but someone who is “vacilando” is going somewhere without a clear destination, whether they know it or there, although he has direction.

“Today, though, we’re just lost. We’re somewhere in the Hudson Valley, rolling down a country road canopied by psychedelically bright autumn leaves. On the Sprinter’s navigation screen, we’re in some sort of uncharted blue-green grid.”

“We’re in the fuckin’ Matrix right now,” Goggins says, confused and amused. He turns the wheel and points us back toward charted territory.

Goggins has lived up here for a few years and he’s done this drive many times, but he’s been out of town a while, and usually he comes a different way. We’re headed to a farm that he uses for things we’ve been instructed not to mention, or have reached the end of their working lives. This is Goggins’s idea. He knows quite what to show people when he’s asked to let them see how he lives. When he’s not working, he lives simply.

“I smoke and I drink coffee and I drink cocktails,” he tells me. “And I may eat one egg a day, 14 hours—from dinner until the next afternoon, when he’ll usually reach for a couple of hard-boiled eggs. I’ve already seen him do both of those things, and it’s just a little early for cocktails, and I know what a man eating a boiled egg looks like. So we’re on our way to pick up Augustana, Goggins’s 13-year-old son, and the three of us will satisfy a boy’s basic urge. Goggins has just finished shooting season three of HBO’s The White Lotus in Thailand and season four of