“I understood, intimately, Rick’s frame of mind. I don’t think he’s alone in the world.” Photo: HBO

Spoilers follow for The White Lotus season-three finale “Amor Fati.”

Rick Hatchett got everything he ever wanted. He found someone who loves and accepts him and makes a vow to value her. He faced the man who killed his father and walked away a better man. “I got the monkey off my back,” Rick tells Chelsea in The White Lotus season finale, and Walton Goggins delivers the line with exhausted, aching relief. But the respite is short-lived. Hotelier Jim Hollinger returns to the White Lotus and insults Rick’s mother, Rick backslides into his plan for revenge and shoots Jim and Jim’s bodyguards, then shoulders a double whammy of calamity: Jim was Rick’s father all along, and Chelsea’s been killed in the shootout. In another world, Rick would be fetching Chelsea doughnuts off hotel breakfast buffets forever. In this one, the last act of “Amor Fati” relies on Goggins’s ability to convey agony, fury, and despair as he cradles Chelsea’s body and is then shot himself, a series of events that teaches us a lesson about holding onto anger too long and breaks our hearts in the process.

In a season obsessed with the impact of money on a person’s soul, whether scarcity can be as much a motivator as abundance, and the dilemma of what happens after giving one’s brother a hand job, Rick’s story was perhaps the most straightforward. Man makes an enemy to avenge his father, man learns that enemy is his father, man and father die tragically together without ever knowing each other. But Goggins, who refuses to limit Rick to a piece of fiction and who watched the finale alone as part of his farewell process to the character, says that within the story of Rick and Jim is a universal message about how we move through the world as wounded people. It’s one that aligns closely with a chapter of Goggins’s own life nearly 20 years ago, when he visited South Asia after his first wife died by suicide. And it’s one the Justified, Fallout, and The Righteous Gemstones actor approached through his personal ethos: You find peace by falling in love with yourself, and by allowing yourself forgiveness.

Tell me how Mike presented Rick’s arc to you. 

I read in black-and-white what you just saw. I texted Mike and I said, “You don’t know how close this is to me as a person. If what you’re looking for is my understanding of what it is that you’re asking me to do, and my willingness to go there for this story, the answer is yes. But we are going to go there, and I’m really going to go there, and you guys need to understand what that means. It will fit in your White Lotus language, I promise, but then it will expand. It has to go to places I don’t think it’s gone before, and I need to know I have that support from you.” And they said, “Absolutely.”

Can you tell me what felt so close about it?

I went to Thailand 18 years ago after a trauma in my life, looking for peace, looking for some resolution that was not so dissimilar from what Rick was looking for. The circumstances were dramatically different. I was a year into a relationship with my now-wife, and I was as lost as Rick is lost. I had nothing for my partner. I understood, intimately, Rick’s frame of mind. I read it on the page and I thought, The universe brought this to me for a reason, because I understand him, and I love him, and I love people like him. I don’t think he’s alone in the world.

I’m going to read something you said about spirituality: “What has brought me an extraordinary amount of peace in my life is when I finally fell in love with myself. Genuinely, I think that is the path of all spirituality. You can say it’s about finding God, but when you find your god, you’re still going to have to face yourself.” Did you apply that ethos to Rick? 

It’s something I applied to Rick. I think most of us start off not having the tools to love ourselves, not having the space to even contemplate what that really means. Some people are never able to transcend in that way and love themselves. I had reached a moment in my journey predicated on the series of events in my own life at this time. I searched for three years and didn’t have an option to go forward as the person I was before this moment in my own life. It was like, This is it. Just forgive yourself. Forgive your circumstances. Forgive the people that fucking were doing their best, and just be okay with it. You don’t have to be anything other than what you are, and you’re enough, man. If you can love you, then you can love anybody. Those were lessons I learned 15 years before this experience, and they were hard-won. Reading the scripts, I felt like this guy will realize it too late.

Rick Hatchett is not a fictional character to me. He’s a real person consumed by something that happened to him that he had no control over.

Did you talk to Mike about whether Rick, at any point, would wonder if Jim was his father? I ask because it’s a theory that’s been going around the White Lotus viewership for a while.

I’ve seen all of these theories, and as it turned out, they were right. But you’re looking at the presentation of a story over an eight-hour period. We all are familiar with this format of storytelling. That’s not Rick Hatchett. Rick Hatchett doesn’t have that foresight. His story is predicated on the story that was told to him. It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t looking for flaws in a story that audiences of a show, who may have seen the first two seasons, are able to guess as a possibility. Rick Hatchett is not a fictional character to me. He’s a real person consumed by something that happened to him that he had no control over. From an actor’s perspective, no, it never entered my mind that this guy might be my father. How could you abandon a child? I am a father and I could never conceive of something like that.

What did enter my mind is ultimately what happened, and what happens to so many of us. I had my post ready, and I knew what I was going to say: “In the depths of our despair, there is always beauty around us.” It’s up to us to see it. That was my journey, and that’s Rick’s journey. We’re not the only people in the fucking world that has experienced that. It is all of our journeys. Whether you’ve lost a job, whether you’ve lost a spouse, whether you were molested, whether you were abandoned, we carry these traumas. We all have them. We are all so much more similar than we think. The person sitting next to you on the subway, the plane, the bus, or the person you’re standing beside at pickup at your school. You don’t know what they’ve gone through. If you can look at someone and lead with the fact that they may very well understand your pain, then we would all be in a very different place. That was my experience and what I needed to understand in order to fall in love with myself and forgive myself, which then led to me being able to forgive those around me. I think that’s what Mike was trying to say.

Did Rick believe Jim was his father?

I do think he believed it. I don’t think he was given the time to process it. He takes that information in, and as soon as it registers, he’s being shot at. And he is a killer; he’s killed people before and in his business. It was just instinct. It’s not like he doesn’t know how to use a gun, or hasn’t used a gun before.

“We talked at length about this walk. I said, ‘Rick is going to walk with her until he dies. He’s going to walk with her across the fucking Earth. He won’t stop walking with Chelsea in his arms.’”

Can you tell me more about filming the shootout sequence? 

There were things that were cut, the things that were in this story from the very beginning. Mike made a very conscious decision to withhold information and withhold emotion. It was painful at the time to see things I thought would be there cut out. But he was absolutely right to withhold Rick’s vulnerability and parse it out in really small parts.

The filming of this whole sequence was really, really personal. Every actor who has to go through something like this will tell you that. You know it’s on the schedule. You don’t want those days to come. I was alone for a lot of it. A lot of it was really just in my head, except for that first scene where I come up and ask for help, and then I was just alone on the bench. I asked that no other actors come and watch. I think my sadness was really starting to weigh on Mike, because he’s a very sensitive person and he’s a very open, kind human being that is capable of very, very deep feelings. I think it got to a point where everyone was sad, because it was so sad. It was hot and it was lonely. It was like, 12, 36, 40 hours of sustained anxiety. The first part, which was me asking for help, knowing that I needed help, trying to self-soothe — that was a day. Rick not being able to sit in his pain, making that decision without even making it, that was day two. Day three was the shootout, and then the revelation of what my actions had caused, and that was the loss of the very thing I longed for and had wanted the whole time.

We talked at length about this walk. I said, “Rick is going to walk with her until he dies. He’s going to walk with her across the fucking Earth. He won’t stop walking with Chelsea in his arms.” The very thing that he had been looking for his whole life was staring him in the face. That’s the irony, and that’s the fucking tragedy. He passed the first test. All the chatter from people who said they were disappointed in this resolution — hold on, this is a win. This is what you want in life. Maybe not in drama, but in life, you want someone to turn the other cheek and rise above it. And then the story turned and he was incapable of turning it off. At the end of those three days, after it was done, Mike said, “It’s over. Let it go. We can be light.” And I said, “Well, I still got the confrontation in Bangkok. But we’ll be light for a little while.” [Laughs.]

All of these characters come from Mike’s heart. Knowing him the way that I know him now, he cares so deeply about all of them. On my last day of filming, I was with Sam on the river, and I came up to this dock, and there was my room that I stayed in 18 years earlier. We were filming in front of this room. We had done the night work in front of this hotel, and Mike came into my room and he said, “Listen, I can’t be there for the rest of tonight. I can’t be there to see you off. I got to go.” I’ve worked with a few directors that have said something very similar. It’s too painful. I said, “I love you, buddy. It’s okay. I got this, and thank you. I know I’ll see you for the rest of my life.” Sometimes when you can’t say good-bye, you don’t want to say good-bye. I think it was him saying good-bye to Rick. I said good-bye to Rick just now, when the credits rolled. I haven’t been able to let him go for a fucking year and a half. That was Mike beginning his process for letting him go.

What conversations did you have with Aimee about her death scene? 

Well, it’s a double death scene, isn’t it? We talked at length about how fitting it is for these two people that are soulmates, that do deeply love each other and are so spiritually connected, that this is the end, and their story will continue the way Chelsea imagines it, in the afterlife, and the next life, and the life after that, and the life after that. This isn’t the end of their journey, but it’s the end of their journey now. The way Rick treated Chelsea, that’s not the totality of their relationship. For Rick, his hero’s journey to enlightenment is to find it, to live in it, to embody it, and then to realize just how fragile that is for all of us. It is only with a dedication to a life of understanding yourself that you don’t react to things, and a rock thrown into a pond will just forever be a ripple. It won’t turn into a tsunami once it gets to shore. That just wasn’t where Rick was. He realizes in that moment that all he had to do was love himself so that he could love other people and accept love from other people. It’s that simple.

Given all that, can you tell me about the final expression on his face? 

How did you read it?

I read it as a smile, one that evoked his smile from the preceding episode, where he’s sitting in the chair amid the partying and he seems at peace. It felt to me like a version of that, now with all of this regret and awareness of the role he played in this chaos. 

It was written in the script that Rick is smiling, looking up at the sun. That’s not what you saw, right? Those are just words on a page. We never talked about it. Mike just left it to me, to whatever that means to me. It’s just too personal, really, to tell you. I wish that I could. I think that what you said is true, that he is released, but there’s still more work to do.

You had the surprise appearance in Justified: City Primeval in 2023. Everyone lost their minds when you and Timothy Olyphant got together in Thailand in March 2024. Last April you said the two of you would like to do another season of Justified. I’m curious if there’s any update on that.

I would be surprised if that happens. I really believe we’ve said everything we need to say, but I never say never to anything in life. I’m just so grateful that I got to say words in Boyd’s voice, and use his delivery again. I don’t know the answer to that question, but that would probably have to be down the road, and we’d be too old to do it anyway.

Did you attend any of the karaoke parties during production?

Yeah, I attended the first one and I sang “Alison.” That was my contribution.

Is that your normal go-to karaoke song?

I love Elvis Costello as much as anybody. I’ll go all over the map. Even the Baby Billy songs. I’ll sing just about anything.