[This story contains major spoilers from The White Lotus season three, episode seven, “Killer Instincts.”] It may have taken almost his entire vacation, but Rick Hatchett finally relaxed during Sunday’s episode of The White Lotus. For Walton Goggins , the wait was considerably longer.
The apparent culmination of his antihero’s journey wasn’t filmed until almost the very end of the Thailand shoot, and the relief on his face at the end of the episode is as much his own as it is Rick’s. “It took me six months and seven hours of this experience to smile, to really smile,” Goggins tells The Hollywood Reporter of the penultimate episode of season three. “It’s not joy, but there’s contentment or peace for a moment.
Other actors would’ve arrived at that very different way and lived their life.” Goggins has not been shy about how difficult the White Lotus shoot was for him . Rick’s reasons for being so surly weren’t revealed until the season was half-way done.
“It takes until episode four for the audience to really understand the motivations for this guy, where everybody else’s motivations are pretty clear in episode one,” he says. “There were so many ways in which this guy could have been marginalized right out of the gate.” His motivations were, of course, revenge.
Rick revealed to girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) in that fourth episode that his father, dead before he was even born, had been killed in Thailand by a developer — one who hap.