Sixteen years after Justified, Walton Goggins's best work is in a Thailand hotel
From Fallout’s Ghoul to Justified’s Boyd Crowder, Walton Goggins has form for unforgettable TV turns.
You could go just about anywhere for a sun-soaked drama these days—Hawaii, Italy, Thailand—but none of those exotic settings quite hit the spot like they do on The White Lotus. HBO has delivered three seasons now, each set somewhere lovely, each with a whole new crop of questionable resort guests, and every year this series sneaks onto my must-watch list like clockwork. Everybody’s on about it—at home, online, everywhere. It’s packed with bite: send-ups on money, privilege, families that are hanging on by a thread, and death always lurking. The dialogue’s sharp, the mysteries keep you guessing, and the dark comedy stings. Season 2 had people utterly obsessed, mostly thanks to its theme music invading TikTok. But the big story this time is Walton Goggins blowing the barn doors off Season 3, turning in a performance everyone’s going to remember for a long while.
Walton Goggins’s Standout Turn
Most people know Walton Goggins as troublemaker Boyd Crowder from Justified (2010-2015), a series still beloved by anyone with a soft spot for modern Westerns. He’s shown up in all sorts since—playing a frazzled dad in Netflix’s short-lived The Unicorn (a show nobody watched but plenty of people should have)—but for my money, Goggins’s best work in years is as Rick Hatchett in The White Lotus Season 3.
Rick arrives at the Thai resort like a walking storm cloud, joined by his endlessly upbeat partner Chelsea, played by Aimee Lou Wood. She’s buzzing over the prospect of a proper holiday, while he’s got the face of a man whose flight just made an unscheduled landing in purgatory. From go, Rick’s got a chip on his shoulder and a fixation on finding Jim Hollinger. The catch: Jim happens to be married to Sritala (Patravadi Mejudhon), who owns the very resort where they’re staying. There’s some murky business going on—no one’s saying why Rick needs to track him down, but if you’re expecting simple answers, think again. The reveal’s a belter, full of nasty surprises.
Goggins is the sort of actor who makes even a simple glare look threatening. Anyone else could have made Rick an unwatchable moaner, but he gives the bloke actual weight. You spend half the episode annoyed with him, the other half actively wanting to know what he’s hiding. It’s the same magic he worked on Prime Video’s Fallout, only here he’s less monster, more ticking time-bomb in a linen shirt.
Drama in Paradise
Even with a huge cast, Rick is hard to ignore. There’s plenty of competition: Michelle Monaghan turns up as Jaclyn Lemon, who can’t stop sniping with her friends under the guise of being supportive. Parker Posey is Victoria Ratliff, bored wife with a platinum credit card, stuck in a role we’ve seen before, but she makes it work without phoning it in.
The series opener, "Same Spirit, New Forms," makes it clear that Rick and Chelsea are a disaster in the making. She’s working overtime to keep things breezy, hiding buckets of anxiety behind her best smile. Whenever she’s urging Rick to get in the holiday mood (or spends a little too long chatting with strangers at the hotel bar), you know the writing’s on the wall for them. Their relationship brings more questions than it answers, and you’re left wondering what on earth brought them together in the first place.
The third season of The White Lotus takes viewers to Thailand, with Walton Goggins’s performance as Rick Hatchett stealing the spotlight amid another round of resort intrigue and family chaos.
The best part of The White Lotus is how it never skimps on characters you can’t quite predict. Natasha Rothwell returns as Belinda Lindsey for Season 3, and with Laura Dern reportedly joining for Season 4, there’s no sign of the fun running out soon. The mystery and spectacle keep the show moving, but I don’t reckon we’ll be forgetting Rick—or that performance—any time soon.