Walton Goggins was 'Gutted' By The White Lotus Season 3

Walton Goggins in The White Lotus Credit - Fabio Lovino—HBO

Few of us, not even Hollywood royalty, would turn down the opportunity to spend the better part of a year living in a luxury Thai beach resort—not to mention while starring in one of the world’s most popular TV shows. But for Walton Goggins, joining Season 3 of The White Lotus came with unseen baggage.

The Alabama native came to the Thai island of Koh Samui (where the new Lotus is set) almost two decades ago after tragedy struck in his private life. Returning was a heart-wrenching proposition—not least since Goggins’s on-screen persona of Rick—the twitchy, depressive boyfriend of the much younger Chelsea played by Aimee Lou Wood—shares a lot of the brooding misanthropy of his former broken self.

“I went all over Southeast Asia for two months really trying to understand just the right question to ask, let alone an answer,” Goggins told TIME on location in Koh Samui in June. “So, to come back is very personal to me.”

After a few months wandering beaches and bars in search of solace, Goggins had “a particularly bad evening and I booked a plane to India the next day,” he recalls. “That was kind of make or break for me. And luckily for me, I found what I was looking for.”

It's one of the many ways that joining Lotus has been a journey for Goggins, a recognizable and beloved character actor who has appeared in iconic television shows like The Shield, Justified, and most recently Fallout, as well as hit movies from Shanghai Noon to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight.

Read More: Behind the Scenes of The White Lotus’ Bigger, Wilder, Darker Third Season

Still, Goggins says there’s few better auteurs for teasing the hidden depth from cast members than Lotus creator Mike White—who writes, casts, and directs every episode—even if actors don’t always know it themselves.

“It’s the way that Mike writes these people, and his ability to cast what he's looking for, the essence of someone,” Goggins says with an admiring shake of the head. “He didn't know my life story and yet he offered me this role. It was only after reading it that I had a conversation with Mike to say how close this is to my own life.”

Although Lotus is the first time Goggins has worked with White, they’ve been longtime acquaintances and have lots of mutual friends, including Laura Dern, who collaborated with White on their critically acclaimed series Enlightened. “Enlightened really blew my mind,” says Goggins. “I had not seen anything quite like that.”

When it comes to Lotus, Goggins says he is a “big fan” of the previous seasons, which began as a single-location miniseries produced amid rigorous pandemic protocols. “COVID wreaked a lot of havoc in this world but at least it gave us The White Lotus!” he says.

When Goggins finally got the scripts for Season 3, he devoured them. “I read all eight scripts in a day,” he recalls. “It took about 10 hours between a plane ride and then a glass of wine when I got home to get that full experience. I didn't anticipate where it was going. And by the end of it, I was gutted in such a visceral way. I use that word specifically. It's an emotional wrench.”

While the broad theme of Lotus Season 1 was power and Season 2 was sex, this third installment, which debuts Feb. 16, delves into Eastern mysticism and death. The theme is very close to Goggins, who describes himself as “a deeply spiritual person,” owing in part to growing up with a mother who was a Paramhansa Yogananda devotee. “I started reading Joel Goldsmith when I was 12 years old, and the Urantia, a very esoteric deep explanation of the universe. That's primarily the only type of material that I read up until I was 24 years old.”

It's a schooling that made Goggins really appreciate the message that White is trying to convey in this season. All those existential questions that preoccupied Goggins in his youth “mirrors the lessons that Mike is exploring, and this story is baked into the words in the show,” says Goggins. “He's basically saying, ‘if you can do this and this and this, life will be okay.’”

Now 53, Goggins is among the most experienced members of a youthful cast. Yet given the success of the first two seasons of Lotus, which racked up 15 Emmys to date, he’s not immune to the pressure.

Read More: Natasha Rothwell on What to Expect From Her Beloved Character in The White Lotus Season 3

“We’d be lying if all of us didn't show up and feel that [pressure] on some level,” he says. “But it's a really great group of actors ready to do whatever it takes and give it their best shot. You don't want to let Mike down. And you don't want to let the fans down.”

And despite being no stranger to big ensemble productions on far-flung locations, Goggins still found shooting Lotus stretched him in ways he didn’t anticipate. “I've been on projects for 9 months at a time,” he says. “But the carnival that Mike has assembled I've never experienced before. We work, we live, and we eat in the same place.”

Goggins admits to finding that forced intimacy slightly unsettling. “I didn't understand the social component of this experience,” he says. “I'm a loner. I'm an extroverted introvert. I don't eat breakfast with anyone except my son and my wife. I usually eat lunch by myself. And here all of us—18 or 30 people—eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together.”

Rather than being able to drive away from set and relax at home, for the Lotus cast home became an adjacent hotel room almost identical to the one they’d been filming in all day. Meanwhile, social interactions—barring daytrips and sporadic family visits—were largely restricted to colleagues.

“There is no escaping The White Lotus experience because you're living in a five-star resort, eating this resort’s food, playing these people,” he says. “We’re literally coming home at night and looking at people having dinner that you've been satirizing all day. It's very strange.”

Compounding matters, working in such proximity rendered it difficult to switch off even when actors are not personally involved in a particular scene. “I'm a person who doesn't like to sit on the sidelines,” says Goggins. “I like to be in the game. And so out of sight out of mind. But here it's never out of sight. And it's never out of your mind.”

It also meant that the space between life and art began to blur. “It's scary, really, the similarity as everybody has assumed their personas,” says Goggins. “Whether they intended to or not, whether it's conscious or subconscious, we've all become the people that we’re playing. Aimee Lou is very, very much that person. And Parker [Posey] is very similar to who she is playing.”

Even Patrick Schwarzenegger’s corporate jerk? “Patrick might be the only one [who’s different]!” laughs Goggins. “Patrick might be the only adult in this entire cast. Really, the guy is very special.”

Although today in a much better place, Goggins says that the journey of self-discovery that reached a personal nadir in Samui never ends—whether you’re acting in Lotus or watching it on your sofa. “Everybody in this cast has something that they need to learn,” he says. “And on the page, but also personally, I think we're all going through our own existential crisis, playing people going through an existential crisis.”

Goggins hopes that White’s writing has the potential to be not only entertaining, but also cathartic, or even healing. “The pearls of wisdom that he's laying at our feet, and what he's proposing for one's life, is timeless and some of the wisest words I've ever read,” he says. “Lessons that if one learned early on in life would avoid a lot of pain. This isn't hyperbole, that really was my experience. Hopefully, you'll feel it watching. I don't know.”

Write to Charlie Campbell at charlie.campbell@time.com.