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 WolfsonDirector of Photography: AJ YoungEditor: Boris KhaykinTalent: Walton GogginsLine Producer: Joseph BuscemiAssociate Producer: Paul GulyasProduction Manager: Peter BrunetteTalent Booker: Mica MedoffCamera Operator: Shay Eberle-GunstSound Mixer: Kari BarberProduction Assistant: Fernando BarajasPost Production Supervisor: Christian OlguinPost Production Coordinator: Ian BryantSupervising Editor: Doug LarsenAdditional Editor: Jason Malizia
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00:00I'm so sorry, is this seat taken?
00:02Okay, thank you.
00:04Table for one, right?
00:06Hello, I'm Walton Goggins,
00:07and this is the Wired Autocomplete Interview.
00:10["Wired Autocomplete Interview"]
00:16Okay.
00:17["Wired Autocomplete Interview"]
00:20Where did Walton Goggins grow up?
00:23I grew up in a little bitty town called Lithia Springs,
00:26which is about 20 minutes outside of Atlanta, Georgia.
00:29It's a beautiful little town, it only had one stop sign,
00:32and nobody else is from there but me.
00:35Does Walton Goggins really have a southern accent?
00:41I do have a southern accent, you know,
00:42because I'm from the South,
00:45so I speak like the other people speak
00:47that I grew up with.
00:49I can change it.
00:50I can't really do many accents.
00:52I mean, I can do southern accent,
00:54and I can just do one that has
00:56just a slight southern accent to it.
00:58That's about it.
00:59It's the only range I have.
01:01Walton Goggins looks like Jim Morrison.
01:05Thank you.
01:07Really?
01:08Jim Morrison, if he had teeth this big, I'll take it.
01:12Last one, Walton Goggins.
01:14Photography, oh, I like taking photos,
01:17I like traveling, and I like taking pictures
01:20of the people that I meet along the way,
01:22so photography for me is a really big deal.
01:25It's the way I document my experiences.
01:27Check this out.
01:28Next, this guy, is he in the union?
01:32What is Walton Goggins best known for?
01:36Well, it depends on who you ask, right?
01:38I like to think clogging, but most people would disagree.
01:42Maybe The Hateful Eight, maybe The Shield,
01:44maybe Justified, maybe Vice Principals,
01:47maybe The Righteous Gemstones,
01:49but right now, it's for Fallout.
01:52Okay, Walton Goggins, upcoming projects, Fallout,
01:58season two, oh, and I am currently doing
02:01The White Lotus, season three, how about that?
02:05Unbelievable, we're filming it down in Thailand.
02:07Walton Goggins, Quentin Tarantino, ooh, how about that?
02:12When I was a little kid, I never thought I would see
02:14this name next to this name.
02:16I worked with Quentin two times on Django Unchained
02:19and The Hateful Eight, and he is my favorite filmmaker,
02:24living or deceased, thank God he's still living.
02:28My favorite, okay, Walton Goggins, Western movies.
02:31I've been in a few of those.
02:33I love Western movies, I love watching Western movies.
02:36My son was 11 years old when we really started
02:39introducing him to a lot of different films,
02:41and the Western genre was the first one
02:44that we started with, like the man who shot
02:45Liberty Valance, Rio Bravo, Stagecoach,
02:48and all the rest of them, and he loves
02:51the Westerns as much as I do.
02:53Sergio Leone, I love you.
02:55Oh, one fan fact, Eno Morricone, the great guy
02:59who won the Academy Award who did all of Leone's films,
03:02I got to record with him at Abbey Road in London.
03:06How about that?
03:09Can Walton Goggins sing?
03:11You know, the greatest compliment I've ever been given,
03:14true story, was Walton Goggins can sing well enough
03:18to believe that he would never make it as a singer.
03:22True story.
03:23Can Walton Goggins clog?
03:26Yeah.
03:27If this was a full shot, I would clog for you here,
03:28but it's not, so I can't.
03:30Just trust that these feet were made for clogging.
03:33My mother was a clogger, and she got me
03:36into a clogging class, believe it or not,
03:40that was a thing in Lithia Springs, Georgia,
03:42where I'm from, and she did it because my mom
03:45loves to dance, and she wanted me to dance with her.
03:48So I learned how to clog, but I also learned how to bop,
03:52and bopping is the Florida version
03:56of the North Carolina shag.
03:59It's super cool.
04:00You know what else my mom taught me that's not on this list?
04:02She taught me how to two-step, and I'm a mean two-stepper.
04:06Walton Goggins, Misbehavin'.
04:09Yes, this is a song that I sang with Jennifer Nettles
04:13in season one of The Righteous Gemstones.
04:15The thing that I had going for me
04:17was singing it with Jennifer Nettles.
04:19They boosted all of the lines that she sang,
04:22and they brought all the lines that I sang down.
04:24You know what, maybe you know this lyric,
04:27running through the house with a pickle in my mouth.
04:30Thank you.
04:33Wow, God, you should do this for a living.
04:35It's extraordinary.
04:36Is Walton Goggins a bad guy in Fallout?
04:40Oh, a great, great question.
04:42The thing that I love about doing Fallout so much
04:45is it was architected in a way
04:47that the antagonist becomes the protagonist
04:51that may also become the antagonist again.
04:54And I would say that that applies
04:56to everybody that's in the show.
04:58It takes a lot of energy to survive in the wasteland.
05:01And sometimes you gotta be a good guy,
05:03and sometimes you gotta be a bad guy.
05:06Is Walton Goggins a nice guy?
05:09Fuck yes, I am!
05:10I'm the nicest guy!
05:13Where's the next fucking card, man?
05:17Just kidding, can I cuss?
05:18I don't even know if I can cuss.
05:21Okay, is Walton Goggins,
05:23wow, this is a long piece of tape.
05:25This is scaring me.
05:26Coming back to Justified.
05:28I would absolutely love to come back to Justified.
05:31So would Tim Olyphant.
05:32And I know FX would like to have Justified back on the air.
05:36It's just a matter of timing.
05:38Next card!
05:40Fuck, man.
05:42Thank God you're not in the union.
05:43When does Walton Goggins appear in Righteous Gemstones?
05:48Oh, okay, that's a very good question.
05:50Episode three, season one.
05:53And I appear in the Righteous Gemstones
05:56in a bathtub for the very first time.
05:58And I stand up, and I am naked in that bathtub.
06:01It wasn't my actual body, and it wasn't my anatomy.
06:05It was a 78-year-old stand-in
06:08that they flew in from Chicago.
06:09I got a call after that episode appeared,
06:13and a really good friend of mine said,
06:15my God, your body looks so good, Walton.
06:18What?
06:19It's not my body.
06:20That's a 78-year-old stand-in.
06:23Next, Walton Goggins, Vice Principals.
06:27Mm-hmm.
06:29That was literally one of the greatest
06:31experiences of my life.
06:33Honesty check.
06:35Walton Goggins, on the shield.
06:38Segway into a drama.
06:39Again, another one of the greatest experiences of my life.
06:42We filmed it in Los Angeles.
06:44Michael Chiklis and Kenny Johnson
06:45are still some of my best friends today.
06:47We did the shield over seven years.
06:50It totaled 84 hours of television.
06:54The Sopranos were on at the same time that we were.
06:56But no one, no actor, had been given the opportunity
06:59to play the same character in a serialized format
07:03for 84 hours.
07:05We had no idea that we were astronauts
07:07kind of in this world, if you will.
07:10And when we shot the pilot,
07:12no one had any idea that seven years later
07:15we would be ending this story
07:17having explored every aspect of their psychology,
07:21if you will.
07:22It was and will remain
07:24one of the greatest experiences of my life.
07:29Next!
07:32Thank you.
07:33Walton Goggins!
07:35Hey, I know him.
07:36Walton Goggins, Venus Van Damme.
07:39Oh, this is my girl, Venus Van Damme.
07:42Kurt Sutter, the writer of Sons of Anarchy,
07:46was one of the main writers on the shield.
07:49Very, very dear friend of mine.
07:50And the truth is, this is a true story,
07:52he did an interview where he said
07:56that the only two people that I could never have on my show
07:59are Michael Chiklis and Walton Goggins
08:02because no one could ever see them as anything
08:04but their characters on the shield.
08:06Someone sent this article to me, I read it,
08:09I forwarded it to Kurt Sutter,
08:11and I said,
08:12fuck you, man, I wouldn't do your show anyway.
08:16True story.
08:17I said, the only way that I would do your show
08:18is if I played a transgender.
08:20Two years later, he sent me a text
08:22and he said, were you serious?
08:23And I said, about what?
08:24He said, about playing a transgender.
08:26And I said, do you have pages?
08:27He said, yes.
08:28He sent them.
08:30I read them.
08:32It was one of the greatest things that I had ever read
08:35and it made me laugh and it broke my heart.
08:39And so I bought a pair of high heels
08:42while we were doing Django Unchained
08:44and I walked the streets of New Orleans
08:46at after wrap at like midnight every night
08:49for the better part of a month just to get used to it.
08:52You can walk on high heels on cobblestone streets,
08:54you can walk in them anywhere.
08:55I don't feel like I did that show
08:58because it took four and a half hours to get made up.
09:00I would come very early in the morning
09:02and no one out of respect for me and deference to Venus,
09:07no one ever saw that transition
09:09except the people that were working on it.
09:11Charlie and Kim and all the boys on the show
09:17only ever met me as Venus Van Damme.
09:20We had been friends for years before that
09:23but they never talked to me as Walton.
09:26They only referred to me as Venus
09:28and they treated me like the lady that I was.
09:31It will remain one of the,
09:33also one of the greatest experiences of my life.
09:35Walton Goggins, White Lotus.
09:39Let me just say that again.
09:40Walton Goggins, White Lotus.
09:43Season three, filming it right now in Thailand.
09:46Mike White has a unique way in which he observes the world.
09:52He is able to articulate through dialogue
09:57an existential crisis of people
10:00that is applicable to people from all walks of life,
10:04from all of these different character voices.
10:07And the thing about Mike White,
10:08which not a lot of people know outside of the business,
10:11is he writes all of it.
10:14He does it all himself.
10:16Okay, Walton Goggins, Shanghai Noon.
10:19Yeah, I did that.
10:21There was a time in my life where I,
10:23I don't know if I manifested it
10:24but I just kind of concentrated on people
10:27that I wanted to work with.
10:28And it started with Robert Duvall.
10:30And I did The Apostle with Robert Duvall
10:32about four months after I spent obsessing over
10:36the fact that I wanted to work with Robert Duvall.
10:38Owen Wilson, I did the same thing.
10:40Bottle Rocket was one of my favorite movies
10:43and remains this day to be one of my favorite movies.
10:46And Owen was the guy that I really wanted to work with.
10:48Lo and behold, I got a call to come in
10:51and meet with Tom Dye, the director,
10:53and got the role of this movie with Owen.
10:56And we became friends over the course of making it.
10:59And he is everything that I hoped he would be.
11:01It was a great experience.
11:03Watch this.
11:10Well, that's it.
11:11We're out of boards.
11:12I've never really thought about questions
11:14that people ask when they Google my name,
11:16but this has been illuminating in many, many ways.
11:19I hope that this satiates your curiosity.
11:22Thank you very much for Googling me.
11:26Thank you.