Lifestyle
Walton Goggins on Tarantino, ‘Justified,’ and His Fearless Career
[ad_1]
Welcome to Always Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Walton Goggins talks about his memorable roles on TV favorites like The Shield, Justified, and George & Tammy—as well as everything in between.
When Walton Goggins first auditioned for Quentin Tarantino a little over a decade ago, he was asked to pick between a few Django Unchained characters. He chose one; he performed it well. Then Tarantino started wrapping things up, but Goggins said he wasn’t leaving—he told the iconic director that he was going to read every role on those script pages. “I said, ‘Man, I don’t even care if I get this job, I don’t care if I get to work with you—I’m here with you now, and I’m getting to say your words. I’m going to say as many words as I possibly can,’” Goggins says. “He could have easily said, ‘All right, dude, you’ve got to get out of here.’ But I stayed in there for another 45 minutes reading [maybe] 10 scenes. He not only let me do it—he celebrated it, and he read every other role in the scene with me.”
Goggins ultimately secured the small, memorable part of the malevolent Billy Crash in the Oscar-winning epic, a collaboration that’d lead to a meatier role in Tarantino’s next film, The Hateful Eight. The auditioning experience also speaks to Goggins’s unique tenacity as a performer—willing to go big, to try anything and give himself a real shot. Fame never really interested him; the idea of building a career had barely taken shape by the time he moved to LA from the South in the early ’90s to make a go at acting professionally. “I genuinely just wanted to understand what it was I was trying to ask myself to do—I was ready for a big life adventure,” he says—speaking to the memory of deciding to make a life out of performance. But the sentiment extends decades later to that moment standing opposite Tarantino too.
Like any young unknown, Goggins came up against typecasting and limited opportunities in his early years. In his wild, Emmy-nominated ride—through beloved TV series like Justified and The Shield; gonzo comic detours in Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones; and now, shifts between rich smaller parts in major projects (George & Tammy) and true lead roles (the upcoming Fallout)—he’s proven that sometimes, it takes very nicely not taking no for an answer to prove just how far you can go.
Born in Alabama and raised in Georgia, Goggins left college at 19 and drove across the country with his father to start his new life. The trip took 10 days, and by the time he’d reached the outskirts of Los Angeles County, he felt overwhelmed by the world he was walking into. “Storytelling and acting was always my passion, but I didn’t even want to be good at it—I just really wanted to understand it,” he says. He scraped together guest-acting gigs, and worked however he could to break through. One piece of advice, shared with him on a set, stuck most firmly: “You see this camera? This camera is your friend. It’s not something to be intimidated by…. There’s no magic to it.”
It’s not hard to see how that resonated with him—if nothing else, Goggins is never an actor who seems intimidated by the demands of the day. He goes there, catching everything with his eyes and never reacting like you’d expect. At 24 years old, he nabbed a colorful small part in the Robert Duvall vehicle The Apostle, as a deeply lonely young man who gets saved by a preacher. It’s a bold performance that announces a fresh talent. “I had people whispering in my ear, ‘This is your shot, man; you’re going to be something; you’re going to work,’” Goggins says. “Then I remember getting so fucking caught up in my own insecurity, and I was asking this producer, ‘I need to get a publicist? How do I capitalize on this? What do I do? Oh, my God, it’s going to be my one shot and it’s going to be over.’” The producer replied calmly that getting a spotlight in an Oscar-nominated Duvall movie was the win for Goggins—and that if he didn’t carry that over into whatever came next, a lot of heartache and disappointment awaited.
Good advice, since for many years, Goggins played more parts like this—standing out in substantial projects without necessarily being the face of the thing. In many of these situations, Goggins was cast as racists. “If you’re Italian from New York, you’re going to play a mobster; if you’re white from the South, you’re going to play a redneck,” Goggins says. “You have to work your way outside of that box, but at least you have a sandbox to actually play in.” When he was cast in FX’s acclaimed police drama The Shield as racist cop Shane Vendrell, he really got that room. Airing at the dawn of prestige serialized TV, it provided the unexpected—for basic cable, unprecedented, really—opportunity to chart a narrative arc over 80-plus episodes. Goggins played modes ranging from monstrous to devoted to tragic. “That defining moment is when you show up and you’re not auditioning for Redneck Number Two or Redneck Number Three,” he says. The moment had come.
[ad_2]
David Canfield
Source link
