As The White Lotus nears its dramatic conclusion, it’s clear that Walton Goggins’ character, Rick Hatchett, will play an integral role in this season’s drama. But for the actor, carrying the weight of his character’s intense storyline was almost too much to bear on set.
“What was the hardest part about this experience for me early on was being, excuse my language, the fucking downer in the room,” Goggins revealed on The White Lotus official podcast on March 3.
“Showing up to work every day with 18 people and a green room that’s full of chairs of 18 people that are in a much different place emotionally than I am at the beginning of the story was very difficult,” he said of his The White Lotus castmates.
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“More often than not, my chair is separate. I sit on my own. I do my own thing,” Goggins said. “I just couldn’t, I couldn’t be around them. They didn’t understand why I was there. This guy is isolated… And that wasn’t any fun, you know, to separate yourself from a group in that way. That was really, really challenging.”
Goggins, whose brooding character is in Thailand to avenge the murder of his father, added that filming the show was “more isolating” than he expected and recalled his onscreen girlfriend Aimee Lou Wood calling him out for his mood on set.
“We were all on this boat, and I just had such anxiety about getting on this boat because there’s nowhere for me to hide. I’m a claustrophobic person by nature, and Rick is a claustrophobic person,” he remembered. “I just camped out on the front of this boat… I just filled it full of negative energy, so that no one wanted to be around me.”
“At one point, Aimee, not being mean or anything, she said, you know, leaned over and just said, ‘You know, you’re no fun. I want to be with them,’ meaning you know, Patrick [Schwarzenegger] and the other characters,” Goggins recalled. “I was like, thank you, God, thank you for saying that, you know, because that’s exactly how I want you to feel.”
In episode six’s cliffhanger, Rick comes face to face with the man he believes killed his father, whom he has been trying to track down since the beginning of this season.
Before you go, click here to see all the cameos you might have missed in ‘The White Lotus’ season 3.
