Photography by Dori Fitzpatrick exclusively for The Mountains

I’d only just returned from a morning trail run in the southeasternmost corner of the Berkshires when I got a call from our editor-in-chief.

“Goggins can do it, but only today… at two.”

Could I have expected anything less from one of Hollywood’s soon-to-be hottest leading men? Definitely not. And when Walton Goggins says go—you go. 

After catching my breath, I still have six hours before my daughter’s school bus arrives. Plenty of time for a sunny October drive up scenic Route 7 to the picturesque Columbia County village of Chatham, NY. What would he be like? I wonder in between peeks at the rolling sea of fall color. How does one act when he’s on the verge of the biggest breakthrough in your three-decade acting career?

As I arrive on Main Street at the historic Crandell Theatre, a dark-haired woman in a flowing dress welcomes me. It’s Nadia Conners—celebrated screenwriter, director and Goggins’ absolutely stunning wife. She recently released her first feature film, The Uninvited, about an aging stranger who crashes a Hollywood party with unexpected results (her husband co-stars).

“Walton’s upstairs,” she says, her bright red lipstick revealing an openhearted smile.

As I ascend the narrow side staircase into the antediluvian upper chambers of the throwback theater, the first thing I notice is Goggins’ voice. It comes wafting down the hallway—deep, gravelly. He’s cutting through the small talk with one of our team members when I turn into the doorframe. 

“Sean!” he says, smiling. “It’s so good to meet you!”

He takes my hand and gives it a proper Southern gentlemanly shake. When Goggins talks, you tend to believe him. After a momentary pause for the grooming to finish, the photo shoot begins. At the drop of a hat—or more like an invisible bolt of lightning—Goggins goes to action. Like all the best ones, he’s simply self-possessed. He is, undeniably, himself. The looks, the grace, the effortless expressions. A lifetime’s worth of faces. His sly smile is quizzical, pondering. His mind moves a mile a minute and there’s a slight appealing bizarreness about him that’s hard to pin down.

Set between a sharp jawline and slicked-back hair cresting his high forehead, Goggins’ subterranean green-brown eyes possess a penetrating quality that’s been there since his first role as Lyle in the 1990 civil rights television movie Murder In Mississippi. His au naturel Esquire energy is belied only by the smell of fresh popcorn emanating from the theater café. 

“Honey, this is fucking insane!” Conners says. “That looks so good!”

When the set-up starts to lose steam, Conners quickly injects energy and steers it to the next frame. From free-spoken compliment to candid critique, Goggins and Conners never stop communicating. They get each other, clearly and intimately.

“She’s one of the smartest, most interesting people I know and certainly one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met in my life,” Goggins says of his wife. “Her mind and her heart are singular.”

Inside the theater, FilmColumbia is playing Canadian drama Universal Language, one of 55 films they’ll screen throughout the ten-day festival. I peer beyond the velvet curtain into a darkened auditorium, the audience utterly mesmerized by 24 frames per second. 

After the extraordinary photo shoot, we head back upstairs to the skunkworks Crandell office. A few hours later, Goggins will be on a plane to Los Angeles to film season two of Fallout, the Emmy-winning, post-apocalyptic Amazon Prime drama based on an über-popular video game. He was nominated this year for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his dual role as classic Hollywood actor Cooper Howard and his future self, a demented remnant of the once-great man known simply as The Ghoul. In 2011, he was nominated in the same category for his role as bank-robbing white supremacist Boyd Crowder in FX’s neo-Western crime drama, Justified.

After growing up with few means in Lithia Springs, GA, a one-stop town outside of Atlanta, Goggins says he arrived in Hollywood in 1991 with $300 in his pocket. He set up a valet parking business with friends to make money while taking acting classes with legendary coach Harry Mastrogeorge. After a number of bit parts (including one on Beverly Hills 90210), he got his first big breakthrough in 2002 as corrupt police thug Shane Vendrell in The Shield.

Released just months after 9/11, The Shield portrayed law enforcement in a critical light at a time when that was seen as sacrilegious. The risk paid off and the gritty, compelling drama remains a standout from TV’s aughts golden era. It was the first in a long history of scene-stealing, boundary-pushing roles the talented actor would soon come to be known for.

For a long time, Walton Goggins was the person whose name you didn’t recognize, but whose face you definitely did—the perfect combination for a character actor. On the big screen, he brought to life indecisive senator Clay Hawkins in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and sadistic racist Billy Crash in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. He starred alongside Samuel L. Jackson as Sheriff Chris Mannix in The Hateful Eight. While the leading-man stardom hadn’t quite beckoned as of yet, he went on a tear of blockbuster villain roles in Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Tomb Raider and Marvel’s Ant-Man And The Wasp. 

Then came the comedy with hysterically unpredictable turns alongside Danny McBride as the conniving Lee Russell in absurd Vice Principals and foul-mouthed, clog-dancing preacher Uncle “Baby” Billy Freeman in The Righteous Gemstones. 

As Chappell Roan might say: he’s your favorite actor’s favorite actor. Of course, Roan herself adapted that line from drag queen Sasha Colby—which is curious considering Goggins played trans sex worker Venus Van Dam in Sons Of Anarchy in another standout role. He famously prepped for the role by walking in high heels for hours on Bourbon Street’s cobblestones after shooting all day for Django. In the words of Venus, didn’t your daddy ever tell you to never judge a book by its penis?

“The thing that I know is a recipe for success is waking up with gratitude in your heart and doing the best job you can,” Goggins says. “Listen to the people around you, listen to the world around you and listen to the voice within… and probably the voice without.”

In 2021, our hero left Los Angeles after three decades. He, Conners, their 14-year-old son Augustus and Lucy, a black Labrador, drove cross country in a converted van. Their destination: a 200-year-old hunting cabin on the Hillsdale-Austerlitz line.

“That move was filled with so much hope and so much regret and so much anticipation and so much surrender and so much openness,” Goggins says quietly, and they arrived the night before the movers, sleeping on a shared mattress on the floor. 

“We were in so far over our heads,” he says. “It was snowing the day we showed up and it was freezing, man! It was so cold, and the doors were opening, and this is everything we had. We were there and we had a fire in the fireplace. I remember looking at my family and saying, ‘Wow. We did it, y’all. It’s peaceful. It’s quiet… It’s really quiet… Maybe we should turn on a radio. Should we turn on a radio, man? This is way too quiet. I mean, it’s freaking me out! I don’t know how to deal with this.” 

A man of the people, Goggins is naturally funny, and he seems to genuinely want to make a connection with me. What does this place mean to you now, three years later? I ask the soon-to-be superstar.

“Serenity,” he says. “Peace. The absence of man-made visual stimulation has been replaced by nature. I’m reminded there are rhythms to this world that are seen and unseen. And for me and my family, I think we’d just become disassociated with those rhythms. Not that there’s anything against an urban lifestyle. I absolutely love it. But after 30 years of living in LA, it was time for something radically different in our lives.”

He, especially, didn’t take to the hinterlands at first. 

“I think I had a harder time than anyone because I just didn’t understand who I was in this world,” Goggins says. “I don’t know how to work heavy equipment. I don’t have a machine shop. I don’t have a work bench. And I don’t want to, to be quite honest with you. You know, when I got there people said, ‘So you have this land. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to get animals? Are you going to do stuff?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do anything!’ What’s wrong with just looking at it? What’s wrong with just observing it and letting it penetrate? I just want to walk around. I want to walk around with no shirt on and I want to walk around with a sweater on and I want to walk around with a hat as the seasons change.”

And how about your neighbors? Do they see you as a movie star or just the guy down the road?

“I have the philosophy in my life of how I live my life,” he starts. “Maybe it’s because I come from the South where I was raised the way I was raised. I never meet a stranger, ever… Once we really landed, we began to open ourselves up to something we never had in Los Angeles, which is community—real community. I hang out with plumbers and painters and construction workers and farmers and restaurateurs. It’s just nice to have neighbors that you talk to and need in your life—that you depend on and who, in turn, have come to depend on you. It feels good to be part of a larger social organism. At the end of the day, acting is a job, isn’t it? It just so happens to be a job I’m quite passionate about.” 

We talk birthdays. A Scorpio, Goggins turned 53 in November. He gets genuinely excited when he finds out our kids are both Capricorns, but I turn the conversation back to him. Tell me—how does it feel to be having your breakout moment now, at this point in your life and career?

“I’ve never planned anything in my life,” he says. “I’ve always gone out on a limb whether it be buying my first house or even leasing my first car. I don’t come from means at all, so there’s no great plan. I’ve just kind of let the river dictate my flow in life. And it’s always been in stages. I’m eternally grateful that I’ve been given the opportunities that I’ve been given at a time in my life when I felt like I was ready for them. If it would have happened a year earlier, or God, five years earlier, that might have been the end of my journey as a storyteller. I’m ready for this moment. I’m focused on this moment and on the people around me. I don’t want to let anyone down and, more importantly, I don’t want to let myself down.”

He asks the next question himself. 

“With that comes what? How do you not let yourself down? Just come from your heart and do the best you can do. It’s really no more complicated than that. And so, that’s what I’m doing.” 

Funny story. Goggins and Conners first met on a blind date planned by a mutual friend, though he didn’t actually realize it was a setup until months later. I want to know more about their relationship.

“She’d kill me! She’s so angry that that story’s even out there,” Goggins says. “It’s a bone of contention between the two of us, but I don’t understand how contentious it is because the truth is when I saw her for the first time without knowing this, I was just so taken with her. And two minutes into the conversation, it’s been the way I’ve felt about her 20 years into the conversation. We have a deep, deep friendship and love and respect for each other. God, what more do you want out of a union than that? Again, what are the doors that we walk through? Why do we walk through them? I’m just happy this door presented itself to me and I was smart enough to turn the handle.”

So, it’s timing?

“Everything happens in life at the time it’s supposed to happen,” he affirms. “Like meeting my wife, having my child, any job that I’ve gotten or any job that didn’t go my way. The people around me or the spirits, whatever that is, however I’m moving through this universe, it just feels like somebody was looking out for me.” 

He goes deeper into his Southern accent on that last line. It’s a clear tell that he really means it—in a spiritual sense. More than almost anyone else I’ve ever interviewed, Goggins takes each question to heart. He repeats them to himself. He lets them roll around in his mouth, as “Uncle Baby” Billy would say. As he takes off his glasses, his heady eyes search the outerverse. He hesitates and thinks about his words carefully and shares them with the tenor and cadence all his own. He’s witty, thoughtful and surprisingly honest. You can hear his thoughts unfolding in real time. Most of all, he’s fully present.

What’s the secret to a happy, healthy relationship between two artists? I ask. “I hate to say this, but probably time away, y’know what I mean?” he says, laughing nervously. “That’s a big part of it. There’s real truth in absence makes the heart grow fonder. It allows you to understand the position this person has in your life and how integral they are to your journey on this planet. And we’ve had that for a very long time. More importantly, there’s no one who believes in my wife the way that I believe in her. No one respects her as a writer or as a director the way I respect her. I feel that way as an actor. Nobody sees me the way that my wife sees me. No one’s seen my struggles and successes and failures, right? We’re both repositories for each other’s history, our evolution as people.”

Then he paraphrases a quote by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “We’re the guardians of each other’s solitude… And I believe in that wholeheartedly,” he says. “Relationships that can withstand infinite closeness and infinite distance simultaneously are the strongest.”

This makes sense considering Goggins recently spent considerable time in Thailand shooting what will surely be the fame cannon he’s been on the brink of for decades: The White Lotus, arguably the hottest show on television today. He joins the HBO black comedy drama for season three, adding fuel to an already volatile storyline about the guests and employees of a fictional luxury resort chain whose interactions are twisted by psychosocial dysfunction. It’s absolutely brilliant and truly must-see TV.

After filming, Goggins says he wandered through Southeast Asia for a month, exploring Cambodia and Vietnam, spending time with locals and melting into the flow of life. Ever the intrepid traveler, Goggins and his son are planning an 18-day horse packing trip across the Mongolian steppe this coming summer.

“Growing up in Georgia, the thing I wanted more than anything was to see the world, to get out of the place I was in and be in control—and out of control—in the world,” Goggins says. “You become a conduit for the exchanging of ideas or information. You come back changed in some way or with something of value from that experience that you’re able to share with your community. You’re exposing yourself to the way other people think. How can that not fundamentally affect the way that you live your life at home and in front of a camera?”

Considering the breadth of roles he’s played; I have to ask before we’re done: how do you play a believable character? I mean—are the roles you portray real to you? 

“Simply, I don’t believe in playing a character,” he says firmly. “I’m really more interested in turning yourself over into an imaginary set of circumstances and seeing where it takes you. And making the expression of that experience as easy as possible to attain with as little interference between me and the person that is in this story. Becoming other people? What does that even mean, man? Is my child when he’s four years old who decides that he’s a Viking, is he becoming another person? Is he consciously thinking ‘I’m going to become another person. I’m going to play pretend now?’ I don’t think people fuckin’ do that, man. My job is to make the characters as real as possible. I’m really looking at it and thinking about it without looking at it or thinking about it. Do you know what I mean?”

I do. And I also know that every time Goggins says “fuck,” he’s had yet another mind-blowing epiphany.

At the end of it all, Walton Goggins still feels like a kid against the odds—wild, reckless, audacious, authentic, clever and earnest. He steps outside to smoke an American Spirit in the alley next to the theater. Between two brick walls, he fixes his gaze to the heavens. Seeing what? I don’t know. Maybe it’s simply the wild, uninhibited look of a beautiful, loving, discerning mind, searching for its next breakthrough.

Yeah, Walton Goggins is so ready for his moment. Or, rather, his era.

matinee idols Moments after the poster for Nadia Conners’ film, The Uninvited, was placed at the Crandell Theatre in Chatham, NY, the movie’s writer-director celebrated with her husband, actor Walton Goggins, who also co-stars in the buzzy film.

Crandell Theatre Gets Gorg

After a century of excellence, Chatham’s ‘Jewel Of Main Street’ readies for Its close-up.

When Walton Goggins saw his first film at Crandell Theatre, he was taken away by the feeling of being there.

“It was the idea that this is one screen on one small street in America,” he says of the structure in Chatham, NY. “It wasn’t the opportunity to see five screens. You go to this place to see one movie. That is event viewing at its core.” 

The soon-to-be century-old Spanish Renaissance theater is one of only 144 historic single-screen movie theaters remaining in the nation. Long known as the “Jewel Of Main Street,” the 534-seat theater has remained largely unchanged since it opened on Christmas Day 1926 with a Jules Verne photoplay. The first feature to be shown was Viktor Tourjansky’s silent Russian masterpiece, Michel Strogoff, followed by The Black Pirate starring Douglas Fairbanks in an early two-tone version of Technicolor. The talkies arrived in ’29.

“You go in and something changes,” says communications manager Beth Marchant. “You’re time traveling a bit. It’s part of our American heritage.”

In November, the Crandell closed for a $4 million renovation project that promises new seating, remodeled bathrooms, an expanded lobby, an updated café and a state-of-the-art, digital audio-visual system. The theater is expected to reopen by fall of 2025, hopefully in time for the 25th annual FilmColumbia which presents more than 50 feature, documentary and animated films throughout the ten-day festival. 

“You’re seeing movies the way they’re made to be seen—on a big screen,” says Marchant. “When you’re laughing and experiencing emotions with other people, it gives you a better perspective on the comedy or drama. You go for the energy and to lose yourself in the film.” 

As FilmColumbia’s 2024 honoree, Goggins roused the crowd at a kick-off party at Jack Shear’s Spencertown home. The widower of late abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly donated $1 million toward the restoration of the theater which has also just received a $40,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts for 2025.

“Cinema has always had such a sacred place for humanity,” Goggins says. “It’s the place we come together to have a communal shared experience. That’s truly how I feel every time I come to this theater.”

—Sean McAlindin