Walton Goggins Elevates It
There are few modern actors as purely watchable as Walton Goggins, a performer who is capable of both relishing in lowbrow material and elevating it with effortless charm. And even though he’s really shined recently with perhaps the most consistent lineup of TV work of anyone currently alive (Justified! The Righteous Gemstones! Fallout!), Goggins has been a delight on the small and big screens for decades. The guy from Birmingham, Alabama, with the giant grin and the even more sizable personality has found equal footing in comedy and drama, often blending them together in seamless fashion and creating the highlight of whatever movie or TV show he’s in.
No actor alive wields a Southern dialect like him as he leaps from Foghorn Leghorn to Mark Twain with ease, simultaneously coming across as a talented actor and the most fun guy to run into at a barbecue. And while there have been no indications about what the next season of The White Lotus will entail, now that it’s got Goggins in it? We’ll tune in for sure. But in the meantime, here are 12 essential Walton Goggins roles that take him from underrated supporting roles to standout bit parts to his current status as TV’s go-to “Oh hell yeah, it’s that guy.”
Red Dirt (2000)
Tragically underseen (and painfully hard to find,) the independent film Red Dirt focuses on Griffith, a young man who wrestles both with his sexuality and with the inability to escape the ties that bind him to his small Mississippi hometown. Goggins plays Lee, a lean, musclebound (if you want shirtless Goggins, you’ve got it here) newcomer who falls in love with Griffith and urges him to follow his passions and express himself. It’s easy to see why he would listen — Goggins is a confident onscreen presence, with the buttermilk-thick Southern drawl of an everyman. As such, Red Dirt would be the first role to truly make good on his sheer likability.
The Shield (2002–08)
The Shield occupies a weird space in the era of “prestige TV.” It never quite got the press of its HBO peers like The Sopranos, and it also debuted a bit too early to take part in the new wave shepherded by Breaking Bad and Mad Men. But the gritty crime drama is more than deserving of its accolades, and Goggins, as Detective Shane Vendrell, is a major reason for its success. Shane embodied a lot of what would be considered a kind of archetypal Goggins character — Southern, intelligent, and prone to extreme behavior. But Goggins plays him with such aplomb that one can’t help but feel for him even as he allows himself to go to increasingly horrific places. He might be capable of terrible things, but there are few actors whom we’d rather watch do them.
House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
House of 1000 Corpses spent a long time in a kind of distribution hell, which meant that Rob Zombie’s debut flick didn’t come out until Goggins had already begun making a name on TV. But those who think Goggins is slumming it as the deputy in a slasher film are missing out — Zombie’s Corpses is a delirious take on the hillbilly horror flicks that he’d grown up consuming, and Goggins fits right in as the goofy, ineffective cop. (“I was bit by a cocker spaniel when I was 8-years-old,” he moans after being scared by a dog.) And if you thought Goggins participating in gory situations while mid-century music plays was new for Fallout, it has its roots in the actor’s catalogue here — the most famous scene in the film is Goggins being executed to the strains of Slim Whitman’s cover of “I Remember You.”
Predators (2010)
Predators has a cast that just gets more surprising the longer you scroll through its IMDb page — Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Trejo … Mahershala Ali? It’s a shame that there’s roughly no meat to any of their roles, but Goggins, playing serial killer/rapist Stans, doesn’t let that stop him. Turning his mastery of the “bad guy you can’t help but love” up a notch to the “bad guy you can’t help but really, really hate,” he becomes a ghoulish, loudmouth jerk, the kind of character you beg to see a Predator eviscerate. Luckily, one does — as Goggins cackles with manic glee, one pulls out his skull and spinal cord.
Justified (2010–15)
As the machiavellian Kentucky crime boss Boyd Crowder, it seemed like Goggins had finally found his ultimate calling. Crowder is a particularly thoughtful character, prone to the kind of noirish dialogue and monologuing that an Elmore Leonard adaptation provides, which meant that Goggins regularly stole the show. There was something snakelike to him, a man you would trust against your own best interests and a drinking buddy who would eventually stab you in the back and make you think it might have been a good idea. Through six seasons, he philosophized and plotted in equal measure, and it earned Goggins his sole Primetime Emmy Award nomination. Yep, sole.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
By the time Goggins starred in The Hateful Eight, he’d already established himself as a keen deliverer of stylized dialogue, even when he was playing an uncouth redneck in Quentin Tarantino’s previous Django Unchained. The Hateful Eight, where Goggins plays sheriff Chris Mannix, grants a more fulfilling co-leading part. And if Django’s Billy Crash tapped into Goggins’s ability to thrive with brutal spite, Mannix plays more to Goggins’s excitable energy and capacity for being clever (even when his character seems to be anything but). No performer turns Tarantino’s screenplays into poetry quite like Samuel L. Jackson, but Goggins manages to go toe to toe with him here and survive unscathed. “Chris Mannix, I may have misjudged you!” Jackson’s character says with a laugh. So did we.
Vice Principals (2016)
The lead characters of Danny McBride and Jody Hill’s HBO series tend to view themselves as the centers of their universe and so to stand up to them, a character needs their own irreversible gravitational pull. In Vice Principals, that came in the form of Lee Russell, the effeminate, vindictive co-vice of a middle school who is best friend and arch nemesis to McBride’s Neal Gamby. Goggins plays Russell as both puppeteer of others and victim of his own irrepressible quirks, and he’s right at home as another staple of the McBride/Hill odysseys of terrible men. He also got to show off his musical chops — Before “Misbehavin’” became a surprise hit from The Righteous Gemstones, there was “Busted by Lee Russell.”
Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
Sonny Burch isn’t your typical Marvel villain — he has no fantastical bad-guy alter ego, nor does he have any hidden, radioactive powers to unleash. Instead, he’s all bluster and conniving hustle, a black-market dealer (and reprobate restaurateur) who is simply after the money. The first two Ant-Man movies were smaller scale than the rest of the MCU on multiple levels, but that doesn’t make Burch a pushover. Instead, he provides a sense of relative normalcy that the MCU needs more of. (There are only so many universe-ending threats we can live through.) Of course there would be folks simply trying to make a buck off the science-fiction/comic-book stuff they don’t really understand, and Goggins is the perfect guy to play them.
The Unicorn (2019–21)
On paper, The Unicorn seems like an exercise in the purely saccharine. Walton Goggins plays a Southern widower who has to reconnect with his daughters and try to find love again. But Goggins imbues lead character Wade with a nervous charm; he’s the kind of guy who is constantly having to figure things out for himself — including how to function in the modern dating world. Thus, his status as a “Unicorn” among men feels rather deserved. There is an earnest warmth to him even when things get messy. Unlike other sitcoms where main characters flit in and out of relationships simply because they’re the main character, Goggins makes his romantic exploits feel believable.
The Righteous Gemstones (2019–)
In his second collaboration with the McBride/Hill crew, Walton Goggins may have also found his second magnum opus character: Baby Billy Freeman, a man so absorbed in a blend of pride, shame, and his own bullshit that he’s as compelling as any of the titular Gemstone family. It’s the “bullshit” part that might be the most alluring here — one is never certain just how much Baby Billy, white-haired with the cadence of a Southern Revival preacher gone sour, buys into his own. Is there any part of evangelism and his snake-oil tendencies that he actually believes in, or is he just trying his best to evade his personal demons that tell him to flee whenever things get potentially overwhelming? With this, his initial caricature becomes a layered portrait of a funny and deeply flawed man, a glowing testament to Goggins as an actor.
Invincible (2021–)
In an adaptation of a boundary-pushing superhero comic like Invincible, one might expect Walton Goggins to take on a role that’s a little more gleeful and malicious. Instead, he’s Global Defense Agency director Cecil Stedman, and thanks to some clever writing and Goggins’s down-to-earth performance, he gets to stand out among the ranks of the other violent and ultrapowerful beings. Stedman isn’t always the best guy, and he’s prone to making the hard choices that might hurt someone in the end. But he retains a level-headed sense of humanity throughout and a heart for the regular people whom might otherwise be forgotten in stories about world-changing scenarios.
Fallout (2024)
One-part disfigured mercenary and, now, one-part internet heartthrob, The Ghoul is rightfully the face (or lack thereof) of Amazon’s new Fallout series. In the role, he leans into his makeup and prosthetics as an extension of his expressions rather than a limitation, going through all of the traditional tics of the Wild West outlaw but with irradiated pathos that make him sympathetic. Yes, he does fine work as actor Cooper Howard, a man who is unknowingly stepping along the edge of unstoppable doom, but it’s in the wasteland that he gets his most memorable stuff. Walton Goggins has spent his whole career balancing the real with the cartoonish, the relatable with genre-leaping outsize character work. In Fallout, a series based on a giant and seemingly untranslatable video-game series, he gets his grandest test, and he passes.
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