Warning: This article contains sensitive content; mentions of suicide and may contain spoilers too.
American actor Walton Goggins, who played the role of Rick Hatchett in The White Lotus season 3, has recalled how he undertook a strikingly similar journey in real life nearly 20 years ago. Just like his character, who travels to Thailand in search of answers about his father’s death, Walton too went to Thailand following a personal tragedy — the death of his first wife by suicide in 2004.
In the HBO series, Rick arrives in Thailand seeking vengeance, believing he’s closing in on the man responsible for his father’s murder. But in a dramatic twist revealed in the season finale, Rick discovers that the man he believed was his father’s killer is actually his father himself. What follows is a violent confrontation that ends in tragedy, with Rick shooting his father and dying in the ensuing crossfire alongside his girlfriend Chelsea (played by Aimee Lou Wood).
Walton told Vulture that the script resonated deeply with him, as it mirrored a part of his own emotional journey. After losing his wife, he too found himself lost and adrift, seeking peace and understanding in Thailand.
“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,” he shared. He also noted that, at the time, he had already begun a relationship with his now-wife, writer and director Nadia Conners, but still felt emotionally disconnected. “I was as lost as Rick is lost.”
Reading the script, Walton felt an almost cosmic alignment between himself and the character. “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,” he said.
To Walton, Rick Hatchett wasn’t a fictional role — he was someone he understood on a deeply personal level. “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,” he said.
The Emmy-nominated actor described his time in Thailand as part of a broader emotional and spiritual reckoning — a journey that stretched over years and forced him to confront the pain and change within himself.
“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,” he said. Walton says the experience taught him hard-won lessons about self-forgiveness and the importance of learning to love oneself. “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,” he reflected.
Through his grief, Walton learned to find beauty even in despair — a journey he believes is universally shared.
“It’s up to us to see it,” he said. “That was my journey, and that’s Rick’s journey. We’re not the only people in the f—— 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,” he concluded.
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