10 Photos of a Young Walton Goggins
The White Lotus star has long been making a name for himself in Hollywood for decades.
The man, the myth, the legend, Walton Goggins is having a television renaissance with back-to-back starring roles on Sunday night television in HBO's The White Lotus and The Righteous Gemstones. Something about this double Goggins feature feels reminiscent of times when it was common practice to wait week after week for the airing of television's favorite shows, usually on Sunday nights. Why? Perhaps because he's been on the screen for decades.
Despite all the recent buzz around the 53-year-old actor, Goggins has been a figure on long-running television series like The Shield and Justified. But that is not the extent of Goggins' career, as he's starred in two Quentin Tarantino films and has an Oscar win for "Best Live Action Short Film" under his belt. So, if Goggins's portrayal of Rick, the jaded, short-tempered White Lotus guest and neglectful boyfriend of Chelsea (played by Aimee Lou Wood), feels like the first time the actor has taken over everyone's flatscreens; then we have some work to do recounting his long-running career.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Lithia Springs, a suburb of Atlanta, Goggins is a proper Southerner. Despite moving to Los Angeles at 19 years old to pursue acting, he still brings his homegrown Southern drawl into his roles today, especially in his portrayal of Baby Billy Freeman, the televangelist in The Righteous Gemstones. A Goggins performance is typically a raw portrayal of Southern manhood, often not playing the "good guy" role, whether he's the corrupt detective Shane Vendrell in The Shield or Boyd Crowder, the career criminal in Justified. There is a specific Goggins character archetype and he delivers season after season. The storied director, Tarantino even tapped the actor to play the gunslinging Billy Crash in the 2012 film, Django Unchained and Sheriff Chris Mannix in the 2015 film, The Hateful Eight.
Goggins married director and producer Nadia Conners in 2011, and the pair shares a son. (We are surely not the only ones obsessed with the couple's Hudson Valley home that was recently featured in Architectural Digest with its warm-toned wood walls, and antique country flair.) 2025 might be the year of Walton Goggins, but the actor has been a Hollywood figure for decades.
Click through the gallery below to see young photos of Goggins.
