Walton Goggins has never been hotter.
In the past year and a half, he’s starred in the final season of HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (for Prime Video’s Fallout) and notched his third nomination overall (as supporting actor in HBO’s The White Lotus). He also appeared in a Super Bowl commercial for GoDaddy and a series of comedic spots for Walmart. He hosted a Mother’s Day episode of Saturday Night Live and brought his own mom onstage to dance, which he calls "one of the greatest experiences of my life." When he wasn’t performing, he was styling — attending his first Met Gala in bespoke Thom Browne finery and appearing in Architectural Digest’s "Open Door" video series for a tour of the renovated 1920s Hudson Valley home he shares with his wife and son.
Not too shabby for a guy who arrived in Hollywood some 35 years ago with $300 to his name — and has since accumulated more than 100 TV and film credits.
Goggins spoke with emmy via Zoom from a hotel room during Paris Fashion Week, looking effortlessly cool behind tinted aviator frames. He was in high spirits: He’d just attended the Saint Laurent show ("the invitation of all invitations") and was enjoying some free time "walking the city, getting lost, drinking really good wine and eating really good food."
After three decades in Hollywood, Goggins doesn’t seem fazed by his newfound fame; he comes across as refreshingly down to earth, thanks perhaps to his humble Southern upbringing.
Photo credit: Gavin Bond
Fallout turned Goggins into a badass fan favorite. Adapted from a top-selling videogame, the series has become one of Prime Video’s most successful shows, amassing more than 100 million views and 16 Emmy nominations (it won one, for music supervision). The show’s much-anticipated second season premieres December 17, and Goggins has already assured fans it will "blow season one out of the water."
Set 200 years after The Great War of 2077 — when a thermonuclear exchange destroyed most of civilization — the eight-episode season finds Goggins embodying versions of the same cowboy two centuries apart. In the prewar era he’s faded actor Cooper Howard, and in the post-apocalyptic times he’s the Ghoul, a nose-less, irradiated bounty hunter with a wicked sense of humor.
Watch Walton Goggins during the emmy cover shoot in this exclusive video.
Goggins committed to the series almost immediately after a brief pitch from creators and showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley, Portlandia), whose work he had long admired.
"It was like, ‘Okay, yes. I’m in. I’ll do it,'" Goggins recalls. "And they said, 'Don’t you want to know who you’re going to play?' And I said, 'It’s irrelevant.'"
"They went on to explain it was this character of the Ghoul, who had been walking the wasteland for 200 years," Goggins continues, "but he was also the portal through which the audience gets to participate in the world before it changed. I read the first couple of scripts, and I had never read anything quite like it. The gravitas of the ending of the world — how meaningful that was — resonated very deeply with me."
Photo credit: Gavin Bond
Robertson-Dworet says the dual roles "were the only parts in the whole series that were written with a specific actor in mind." She already appreciated Goggins’s dramatic chops — and they had worked together on 2018’s Tomb Raider — but it was his riotous comedic turn in HBO’s Vice Principals, which he costars in with Danny McBride, that caught her attention.
"He gives a jaw-droppingly bold performance in that show,” Robertson-Dworet says. “Pushing a character as far as Walton did was such a masterful performance; I wanted to see him bring something like that to our Ghoul."
Executive producer Jonathan Nolan observes, "It’s always risky to go after a specific actor, because it’s just a great way to get your heart broken, but there are only a handful of actors who have as much dexterity in both comedy and drama as Walton. There’s a charisma that just radiates off him."
Nolan, who cowrote The Prestige, The Dark Knight and Interstellar with his filmmaker brother, Christopher Nolan, directed the first three Fallout episodes. In terms of intensity and preparedness, he likens Goggins to Oscar- and Emmy-nominated actor Ed Harris. "He knows his craft very well and doesn’t require a lot of handholding," Nolan says. "There was seldom anything that I brought to him that he hadn’t already considered. And it’s just so much fun with actors that smart and that committed."
Photo credit: Gavin Bond
For Goggins, the role requires a punishing makeup regimen, led by Emmy-winning prosthetic makeup artist Jake Garber (The Walking Dead); it involves nine different prosthetics and five hours of daily prep time. By the first day of shooting, the star was wondering what he’d gotten himself into.
"'I can’t believe you signed up for this,'" Goggins recalls thinking. "'I’m too old for this shit. I don’t know that I can pull this off.' But then, like everything, you tell yourself, 'I bought the ticket. I’m taking the ride.'"
To read the rest of the story, pick up a copy of emmy magazine here.
This article originally appeared in its entirety in emmy Magazine, issue #13, 2025, under the title "Balancing Act."
