Ask most of the cast of The White Lotus, and they’ll tell you how much fun they had behind the scenes during the seven months they spent filming in Thailand.
But this seemingly wasn’t the case for Walton Goggins.
While most of the characters are put through the ringer during their stay at the luxury Thai resort, Rick (played by Walton in the series), by contrast, arrives already troubled.
Speaking to the official White Lotus podcast earlier this month, the two-time Emmy nominee said he found it hard “to not stay in it” when the cameras weren’t rolling, which resulted in him often deliberateldistancing himself from his co-stars.
“What was the hardest part about this experience for me early on was being – excuse my language – the fucking downer in the room,” he revealed.
He continued: “Showing up to work every day with 18 people, and a green room that’s full of chairs of 18 people that are in a much different place emotionally than I am at the beginning of the story, was very difficult.
“More often than not, my chair is separate. I sit on my own. I do my own thing.”
“I couldn’t be around them,” Walton recalled. “They didn’t understand why I was there. This guy is isolated.
“And that wasn’t any fun, you know, to separate yourself from a group in that way. That was really, really challenging.”
Because of this, Walton’s experience was “more isolating than I anticipated”, which “reverberated throughout the whole experience for me”.
Later in the interview, he opened up about filming the characters’ yacht excursion, admitting: “I had such anxiety about getting on this boat because there’s nowhere for me to hide. I’m a claustrophobic person by nature, and Rick is a claustrophobic person.
“I just camped out on the front of this boat… I just filled it full of negative energy, so that no one wanted to be around me.”
He even claimed: “At one point, Aimee [Lou Wood, who played his character’s partner Chelsea] – not being mean or anything – she leaned over and just said, ‘You know, you’re no fun. I want to be with them’, meaning, you know, Patrick [Schwarzenegger] and the other characters.
“I was like, thank you, God, thank you for saying that, you know, because that’s exactly how I want you to feel.”
However, it’s worth pointing out that during a video interview with Elle last month, Aimee Lou Wood named Walton and Leslie Bibb as the two co-stars she had the most fun with behind the scenes of The White Lotus.
“I am a Scorpio moon, and Leslie Bibb and Walton Goggins are Scorpio suns, and we were the Scorpio three,” she recalled. “We had a group called Jackson Brown, because we used to just sit and listen to Jackson Brown and drink cocktails and eat fries…
“The most fun [time] was listening to Leslie and Walton tell stories and listening to Jackson Brown. It was the best ever.”
Meanwhile, during a candid interview with GQ published last month, Walton shared that Thailand held a troubling personal connection for him, as he travelled there shortly after his wife’s suicide.
He told the magazine that he even wound up filming outside the same hotel he’d stayed in decades earlier on one of his first days on set.
“I was like, ‘I know this dock. What? OK. Yeah. No. I know this. Oh my God. That’s the room I stayed in 20 years ago. That’s my balcony’,” he explained.
“That’s where I was the very first day I came here, 20 years ago, and in so much fucking pain, man.
“We got out of the boat, and that’s where we were filming, man – all of the equipment was literally right in front of the hotel that I’d picked 20 years ago on the internet, on this little bitty road in this little bitty neighbourhood.”
He continued: “I thought, God, I wish I could hug that guy. I wish I could whisper in his ear, ‘You’re going to be OK. Life continues, and it continues for everybody if you can just hold on and lean into it and keep walking the walk that you’re walking, and keep looking for the answers’.”.
Just two episodes remain in the current series of The White Lotus, the first of which will be available to watch on Monday in the UK on Sky and Now.
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