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- Walton Goggins played Rick Hatchett in The White Lotus season 3, in which his character travels to Thailand to seek out the man who killed his dad
- The actor told Vulture that he went to Thailand in real life after his first wife died by suicide in 2004 and he was “looking for some resolution”
- Goggins said he could relate to Rick, noting: “I was as lost as Rick is lost”
Just like his White Lotus character, Walton Goggins once headed to Thailand with a mission.
In the show, Goggins’ character Rick Hatchett went to the country hoping to avenge his father’s death, only to learn in the April 6 finale that the man he thought killed his dad was his dad.
“I don’t think he was given the time to process it,” Goggins, 53, told Vulture. “He takes that information in, and as soon as it registers, he’s being shot at.”
Rick ends up shooting and killing his father (Scott Glenn), which leaves him and girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) dead after getting caught in the crossfire of the shootout that erupts.
Nearly two decades ago, Goggins himself traveled to Thailand after his first wife Leanne died by suicide in 2004.
“I went to Thailand 18 years ago after a trauma in my life, looking for peace, looking for some resolution that was not so dissimilar from what Rick was looking for,” Goggins said. “The circumstances were dramatically different. I was a year into a relationship with my now-wife, and I was as lost as Rick is lost. I had nothing for my partner. I understood, intimately, Rick’s frame of mind.”
Goggins said that when he read the script for The White Lotus season 3, “I thought, the universe brought this to me for a reason, because I understand him, and I love him, and I love people like him. I don’t think he’s alone in the world.”
He also related to Rick in a way that made the character seem real. “Rick Hatchett is not a fictional character to me,” said Goggins, who married his current wife, writer and director Nadia Conners, in 2011. “He’s a real person consumed by something that happened to him that he had no control over.”
The actor told Vulture that, following his first wife’s death, he went on an emotional and spiritual journey that taught him “hard-won” lessons about himself.
“I think most of us start off not having the tools to love ourselves, not having the space to even contemplate what that really means,” he said. “Some people are never able to transcend in that way and love themselves. I had reached a moment in my journey predicated on the series of events in my own life at this time. I searched for three years and didn’t have an option to go forward as the person I was before this moment in my own life.”
The two-time Emmy nominee said he learned to forgive himself and that he doesn’t “have to be anything other than what you are.” He also learned to find beauty in is despair.
“It’s up to us to see it,” Goggins said. “That was my journey, and that’s Rick’s journey. We’re not the only people in the f—— world that has experienced that. It is all of our journeys. Whether you’ve lost a job, whether you’ve lost a spouse, whether you were molested, whether you were abandoned, we carry these traumas. We all have them. We are all so much more similar than we think.”
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The White Lotus is streaming now on Max.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.
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