Thank You God for All This Goggins

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Something incredible is happening on television right now. Every Sunday night on HBO for the next few weeks, you can watch The White Lotus, which this season features Walton Goggins as a very stressed-out man who is on vacation in Thailand. After that, you can leave your television on the same channel and watch The Righteous Gemstones, which continues to feature Walton Goggins, here as a white-haired televangelist and game-show host. We have a double-Goggins situation on our hands. An entire Goggins block of programming. HBO has taken one of the last remaining appointment-ish windows for scripted television and said, “Let’s give the people two scoops of Goggins.”

The only thing that I find even a little upsetting about this Goggins confluence is the sudden realization that it has been a possibility all along, this idea of filling up our HBO Sunday night with shows that feature Walton Goggins in some way. Think of what he could have done with a season of recurring guest spots on The Sopranos and Entourage in the incredibly weird handful of years when those two shows aired back-to-back. Or Westworld and Veep. Or Succession and Barry. I could keep putting hypothetical Goggins characters into HBO Sunday night shows for hours. Game of Thrones is probably my favorite, but only on the condition he kept his Southern accent and it was never addressed; I thought about this for two seconds and immediately heard him say, “Well now, Daenerys, it appears you got yourself some dragons.” Now you’re hearing it, too. This is the power of Goggins.

What’s most telling about the two characters he’s playing right now is that they’re such different people and yet both squarely inside Goggins’ particular wheelhouse. On The White Lotus, he plays Rick, a walking bummer of a man who travels to a fancy resort in Thailand for reasons that have less to do with spa treatments and meditation than with a lifelong quest for revenge. On The Righteous Gemstones, he plays Baby Billy Freeman, the host of Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers and the deeply jealous uncle of Jesse, Kelvin, and Judy Gemstone. The former character is quiet and reserved, the latter a showman to the core. On paper, the two men have very little common ground other than their affinity for much younger romantic partners who have unconventional smiles and a willingness to put up with world-class narcissists.

But look closer. Look deeper. Both of them are guided by a similar motivation, a feeling that something was denied to them — for Rick, the happiness he could have had; for Baby Billy, the success he felt entitled to — and a burning desire to get their hands on it, even if it means coloring outside the lines. This is a theme of Goggins’s roles. His character on The Shield, Shane, was a cop who went corrupt because he felt he deserved the life the criminals he chased got to live. His character on Justified, Boyd, was a Kentucky criminal who saw running schemes and drugs as his best shot at upward mobility. Rick and Baby Billy are different, sure, but they’re really just at opposite ends of the Goggins spectrum. And he’s giving them both to us in one night of television. We are getting the Full Goggins.

We are getting the Full Goggins in more than one way, too. Baby Billy showed up in the second episode of The Righteous Gemstones’s final season — we had to go on a little detour to the Civil War with Bradley Cooper first — and promptly pulled his pants down to reveal his own little Baby Billy in order to impress upon his nephews and niece “what a fuckin’ man looks like.” There is a long history of actors on this show, to use Danny McBride’s term, “hanging dong,” and even though Goggins has confirmed that said dong was, to use his term, a “dick double,” just watching him gleefully take part in that grand Gemstones tradition is a wonderful treat. He does this thing with his arms and hands during the scene that I’m not sure I can even describe, a kind of peacocking via gesticulation that has burned itself into my brain. As an onscreen comedic bit, it’s a textbook example of an actor committing so wholeheartedly to something so silly that he manages to sell it.

He’s committing on The White Lotus, too, albeit in a way that involves his pants staying on. On this week’s episode, his character took a trip to Bangkok to meet up with an old acquaintance played by Sam Rockwell and, as Rockwell’s character delivered a wild monologue for the ages, Goggins sat there giving a series of facial reactions that you will see in memes for years. A few weeks before that, his character smoked some laced weed, went to a Thai snake show, and proceeded to absolutely freak out and release all the snakes as he had the cathartic wild-eyed realization that he too was a snake trapped in the glass cage of life. We’ve all been there. Probably. Maybe. Rick definitely was there, though. And thank God he was because it gave some genius on HBO’s social media team the opportunity to mash up the scene with the audio of Walton Goggins performing his Gemstones earworm, “Misbehavin’.”

Do you see now, though? Do you see why all of this is so incredible? We’re coming out of another cold winter. The days are getting longer. The birds are starting to chirp in the morning. The leaves are about to start sprouting on the trees. And right now, for the next month or so, our Sunday nights will be filled with Walton Goggins playing miscreants on HBO, complete with dick doubles and snake shenanigans and whatever else he can get himself up to. We are getting the Full Goggins, every dangling inch of it. Please do not take it for granted.

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2025-03-19 00:07