Walton Goggins on Fallout, ‘vilifying’ police in The Shield, and the upside of Marvel green-screen acting

The admired character actor talks to Louis Chilton about playing The Ghoul in the apocalyptic videogame adaptation, and the ‘tough time’ he had towards the end of the crime drama ‘Justified’

Walton Goggins: ‘When I first started acting, I was deeply insecure. I didn’t enjoy it' (Sela Shiloni)

Look at us, man,” says Walton Goggins, with a wide, chummy grin. “There’s no technology. This is human. It’s you and me.” The actor’s singular Southern cadence has oozed from the screen in everything from TV crime dramas (The Shield; Justified) to big Hollywood films (The Hateful Eight; Ant-Man and the Wasp). Looking ever so slightly strung-out – he’s only just flown in from Thailand, where he was filming season three of Mike White’s Emmy-splattered satire The White Lotus – he’s nonetheless in the mood to clown around. “Oh, this motherf***er is heavy,” he grunts, wrenching a small table across the room to position between us. He pantomimes a back injury. Grins again. “Just kidding.”

With a sharp jawline and slicked-back hair cresting his high forehead, the 52-year-old actor cuts a striking silhouette from the shoulders up. Today, in a west London hotel room, he’s a little tired around the eyes, a segment of a chain peeking out from his neckline. And the kind of tan you might expect from someone who’s just checked out of a White Lotus resort. “It’s everything I hoped it would be,” he says of the series. “Mike White is a revolutionary.” Details of his role are still under wraps, but you can only imagine a chewy, character-driven series such as The White Lotus is the perfect platform for the man The Guardian recently (and astutely) described as “the best character actor working today”. Not everybody will recognise the name Walton Goggins in the opening credits of a film – but those that do know they’re probably in for something special.

And what a name it is, too. “I saw [the actor] Scott Glenn the other day,” Goggins recalls. “Literally one of the first things he said to me was, ‘You have the best name in Hollywood. Walton Goggins. What a f***ing name!’” He laughs. “It is big, and it is wild and it is a lot to get your mouth around. But f***... maybe I’m a lot to get your mouth around.” He seems almost to cringe. “That’s probably not the wisest thing to say. But, you know, maybe I’m big and a little wild. The name fits.”

While most of Goggins’s characters can be described as “larger than life”, the cliche takes on new meaning with his latest project: Prime Video’s buzzy adaptation of the hit video-game series Fallout. In it, Goggins plays Cooper Howard, a Hollywood cowboy-for-hire who is transformed by a nuclear apocalypse into a seemingly undying, centuries-old mutant known as The Ghoul. He explains: “I couldn’t say no to the opportunity of playing these two different people, who speak to each other across time.”

Becoming The Ghoul was no mean feat. For most of the series, Goggins is encased in extensive makeup, with a deep red, pocked face – and no nose. Getting it on was a five-hour process (whittled down to just under two) involving nine separate prosthetic pieces. “Once I got it on, it was like getting into a Ferrari,” he says. “You’re like, how fast can this go? What are the limitations of it? I can’t fit a lot of groceries in a f***ing Ferrari, you know.

Created by Jonathan Nolan (Westworld showrunner and brother of Christopher), Fallout is gory and darkly funny, pitting Goggins’s swaggering, violent bounty hunter against an idealistic ingénue (Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell) who emerges from a cult-like society of underground “vault-dwellers” to experience, for the first time, the realities of post-apocalyptic society. “It’s sardonic, satirical, subversive and hyper-violent in a stylised way,” Goggins says.

Seeing red: Walton Goggins as The Ghoul in ‘Fallout' (Prime Video)

But that doesn’t mean it’s frivolous – especially with the threat of nuclear war more real than it has been in decades. Goggins recalls an encounter with his child about six months ago. (He has a 13-year-old son with his second wife, filmmaker Nadia Conners; his first wife Leanne Kaun died in 2004.) “My son came home from school with an extraordinary amount of anxiety and tears in his eyes, asking the very question that I asked my parents 40, 45 years ago,” he says, soberly, intimating that “is there going to be a nuclear war?” seemed to have been permanently erased from the list of childhood terrors. “I was born at a time where I did nuclear fallout drills in elementary and middle school. I never thought that would happen again.”

‘The Shield’ was a show that was, in some ways, vilifying police officers – and that was sacrilegious at the time

Alabama-born and Georgia-raised, Goggins broke into the entertainment industry in the early 1990s. “When I first started acting, I was deeply insecure. I didn’t enjoy it,” he says. “I wasn’t comfortable with it. I wasn’t totally sure what I was asking myself to do.” He describes moments on set when he would wait by the monitor after a take, hoping that someone would say, “Great job, Walton.” “I needed that validation,” he adds. “Now I don’t need approval from anyone.”

It wasn’t until 2002 that he got his breakthrough, when he was cast as the racist, corrupt police thug Shane Vendrell in The Shield. (That was also the year that a short film he produced and starred in, the mordant comedy-drama The Accountant, won an Oscar: he accepted the prize on stage with his creative partners Ray McKinnon and Lisa Blount.) Gritty and compelling, The Shield remains a standout from TV’s “golden era”. In an age when so many older shows have been retroactively condemned for “copoganda”, the series is “as relevant today as it was then”, Goggins says. “It was on the air just a few months [after 9/11],” Goggins recalls. “And a lot of police officers gave their lives. Here was a show that was, in some ways, vilifying police officers – and that was sacrilegious at the time.”

Partners in crime: Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey and Walton Goggins as Shane Vendrell in ‘The Shield’ (Fox-Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock)

After The Shield finished in 2008, Goggins jumped into another TV role – as Timothy Olyphant’s slippery nemesis Boyd Crowder in the Kentucky-set Elmore Leonard adaptation Justified. It ran for six seasons, and Goggins, not chewing the scenery but perhaps nibbling on it, was consistently the best part. In Peter Biskind’s recent book Pandora’s Box, Goggins alludes to tension behind the scenes of Justified, saying he and Olyphant “weren’t talking” by the end of it. What happened there, I ask? It’s complicated. “We had a tough time towards the end of Justified,” he says. “We were so deep into these people we were playing, and they were so polar opposite at this point in the story… I think we were both obsessed with our own points of view, just carrying the weight of this conflict.”

Thankfully, the on-screen rivals have since patched things up. “I think we just needed to separate, like brothers,” says Goggins. He seems keen to make himself clear. “I respect and love him greatly, and I feel respected and loved by him greatly. We just needed to take a break in order to come back together.”

Crime and punishment: Olyphant and Goggins in ‘Justified’ (FX)

If Justified and The Shield showcased Goggins’s dramatic prowess, his work with Danny McBride and Jody Hill on HBO showed that he could nail stylised, absurd comedy – as a vindictive teacher in Vice Principals (available on Sky Comedy in the UK)and as a foul-mouthed, clog-dancing preacher called “Baby Billy” Freeman in the ongoing The Righteous Gemstones (available on demand). Both shows (as well as McBride and Hill’s previous effort, Eastbound & Down) have developed adulating cult fanbases, but missed the plaudits the rest of HBO’s “prestige TV” line-up seems to regularly pull in. I ask why this is.

“I can’t believe you brought that up,” Goggins says, animatedly. “I have to be very careful about how I answer this question. I have very strong opinions about it, and I’m not gonna throw HBO under the bus. But I think it is criminal that the contributions from Danny McBride and Jody Hill and [director] David Gordon Green in comedy and television have never been recognised by any formal institution. I think that is almost unforgivable really – and laughable, at this point. They’ve fundamentally changed the f***ing landscape of what a comedy could be.”

Goggins as Baby Billy Freeman in ‘The Righteous Gemstones' (HBO)

In the world of TV, Goggins has had plenty of chewy roles worthy of his talent. In the movies, such parts were harder to come by. After small turns in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, he got what seemed like his star-making moment, alongside Samuel L Jackson at the heart of Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. This leading-man stardom never quite materialised, but a run of blockbuster villain roles did – in Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Tomb Raider and Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp.

The Marvel oeuvre in particular has come in for flack lately, with actors including Ray Winstone condemning the “soul-destroying” production process and the extensive use of green screens. But not Goggins. “I mean, can you bitch and complain about looking at a f***ing green screen? Of course you can,” he says. “But you also can bitch and complain about being in minus-30-degree weather doing a movie that takes place in the snow, you know?

Samuel L Jackson and Goggins in ‘The Hateful Eight' (The Weinstein Company)

“I can tell you right now – if I did eight movies in a row where I’m f***ing killing myself for an independent movie, that is soul-crushing. I would look at my friends and say, ‘I just want to go look at a green screen for a while.’”

A knock at the door means our time is up – we’re about 10 minutes over, in fact. Goggins is off to the London premiere of Fallout, nose still thankfully intact.

In just a few days, there’ll surely be a whole new set of people googling “who plays The Ghoul in Fallout”, the drawling, fascinating presence stealing each scene while entombed in red makeup. It’s Walton Goggins. Of course it is.

‘Fallout’ is released on Prime Video on 11 April