Walton Goggins Went To Thailand After His First Wife Died—Then Had To Film "The White Lotus" There
Two decades after his first wife committed suicide, Walton Goggins faced his grief again in "The White Lotus."
Long before Goggins was in Bangkok chasing a so-called father-killer in the 3rd season of The White Lotus, he was there chasing a peace of mind. In 2004, his first wife, Leanne Knight, died by suicide. The grief-stricken Goggins left the country in shambles and landed in Thailand.
“I spent the next three years looking for an excuse – not to end it, but certainly putting myself in situations that were questionable, not with drugs or anything like that, just life experiences and traveling,” he told GQ earlier this year. “And I really went all over the world.”
So imagine, twenty years later, showing up to film the HBO hit series and realizing you were right back where it all began. “The first island we were staying on, I realized, ‘I’ve been on this road before.’ And then the next island we went to, I realized, ‘I’ve definitely been on this beach before. I know this boardwalk,’” he said. “All of the things kept coming back.”
One of the final scenes he filmed took place in front of the exact dock and hotel where he had arrived two decades ago, “in so much f*cking pain.” You can’t script that kind of symmetry, as he called it. “I think I haven’t had the time to fully unpack the symmetry between those two people showing up at the same place, separated by 20 years. And a wife and a kid and peace and all the rest of it.”
By now, fans of the show know Rick Hatchett’s arc, a character possessed by revenge to the point that he neglected the woman who truly loved him despite his flaws. In the case of Goggins, he wasn’t merely spouting his lines or showing off his acting prowess. He truly understood Rick. “I was as lost as Rick is lost,” he told Vulture. “I had nothing.”
He and Leanne Knight had been married just three years when she went missing. They discovered later on that she had taken her own life. Her death, as he put it, was “a very complicated story.” He recalled, “Ultimately it was revealed the decision that she’d made. And yeah — I thought it was really unrecoverable for me. Life on the other side of that.”
Now, Goggins is married to filmmaker Nadia Conners and proud father to Augustus. “I wish I could hug that guy,” he said, reflecting on the man who had landed in Thailand two decades ago. “I wish I could whisper in his ear, ‘You’re going to be OK. Life continues … 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.’”
It’s no secret that Goggins found The White Lotus isolating, even before all the ghosts came crawling back. “I understood his isolation, his inability to be understood based on his own trauma,” he told The National. “Right from the words on the page, I knew this was going to be a lonely, lonely experience.”
Filming in Thailand for six months away from his home only amplified it. “There’s the difference between being good and understanding something from the inside out,” he said. “It’s one thing to read the words on the page, but it’s another thing to understand the joys, sorrows and pain that they carry with them.”
Goggins told The National he was drawn to The White Lotus because “so many of the characters I've played are lonely people looking for connection.” Rick is “caustic and unreachable,” but “that’s what makes him relatable.”
“So many of us carry pain,” he said. “We’re all found to be lost and lost to be found.”
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