“I hope that people still have the opportunity to walk the path that I walked, because I wouldn’t have had it any different. I mean, I’m not Mark Ruffalo. I’m not Brad Pitt. I’m not Sam Rockwell, one of my best friends. But I don’t envy anyone else’s career,” Goggins says. “I feel like someone always gave me the opportunity that I needed at the time I needed it. Maybe that’s why everything that I do, whether it’s good or whether it’s not good, I put my heart into it. I love it. And I can’t believe I’m f*cking emotional in front of you, man.”
Walton Goggins’s origin story follows a familiar Hollywood trope: a kid from the heartland travels to California to become an actor. In his late teens, he’d had a small role in the 1990 civil rights TV movie Murder in Mississippi and played high school kids in a handful of episodes of the police drama In the Heat of the Night, both of which shot in Georgia. After a year at Georgia Southern University, he decided to go where movie and TV roles were more plentiful.
“I moved to Los Angeles when I was 19 years old in 1991 with $300 in my pocket, and I didn’t really know anyone,” he says. Goggins got a part-time job that paid minimum wage (then $4.25 an hour), opening an LA Fitness gym at 5 a.m. and clocking out four hours later. That left plenty of time to pursue auditions, but didn’t provide enough income to last very long in one of the nation’s most expensive cities.
“I couldn’t work in a restaurant because I’m not good at having people tell me what to do,” Goggins says. “This isn’t a therapy session, but that goes back to my childhood. I couldn’t have somebody say, ‘Could you give me some tea?’ ‘No, you f*cking get up and go get yourself some tea.”
His goal was to pay not just the rent, but also pay for acting classes. Goggins signed up to hone his skills under the guidance of legendary coach Harry Mastrogeorge, who had trained Ray Liotta, Melanie Griffith, Bryan Cranston, Daryl Hannah, and Djimon Hounsou, among many others.
Goggins got a bit part on a 1992 episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 and played roles like “Young Man #1” in the 1993 Halle Berry miniseries Queen. But those weren’t going to keep him afloat either. “I said, ‘Well, f*ck this. I know valet parking.’ I did that during college and I made a sh*tload of money doing it,” Goggins said. “I can be accused of not being a lot of things, I suppose, but audacious isn’t one of them. I am an audacious person.”
So he put on a performance of sorts: “[I had] the audacity to walk down Ventura Boulevard with a three-piece suit and a sh*tty briefcase that I got as a graduation present and just walk into these restaurants, these big restaurants, to say, ‘Hello, how are you? My name is Walton Goggins. I’m from Atlanta, Georgia—just moved here. I see that you have valet parking. I’d like to bid for your business.’ And when they say, ‘Get out of here,’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think you understand. There’s a level of personal attention that I will give to you and to a restaurant…’ ‘Do you have insurance?’ ‘Yes, of course I have insurance!’… I had no f*cking insurance at all, but I would get it.”
For several years, he ran the business with three other actors, overseeing parking for as many as nine restaurants. “The goal was to have our freedom,” he says. “I was in class when I wasn’t working, and we all covered each other’s shifts.”
His first feature film role was as an unnamed “shaky kid” in the 1992 showbiz comedy Mr. Saturday Night, directed by and starring Billy Crystal. Goggins’s moment was cut from the film, but it ended up amid the extra features on the home video release. Like the Ghoul finding that old Cooper Howard movie, Goggins describes getting his hand on the tape to see his first (almost) movie role: “I’ll never forget when I rented it from Blockbuster and I saw it for the first time, I started crying. There it is. The scene is there.”
Years later—after Goggins became known for his work on The Shield and as the scene-stealing villain Boyd Crowder on the 2010–2015 series Justified—he ran into Crystal again at a Broadway performance of All the Way. “I went to see [Bryan] Cranston do Lyndon Johnson, right? And I walked in and Billy was sitting there,” Goggins recalled. “He said, ‘Hey, Nervous Kid! Don’t forget I gave you your first job!’”
