Walton Goggins reveals tragic connection to White Lotus plotline that left him as lost as Rick

Walton Goggins experienced a full-circle moment while starring as Rick in “The White Lotus.”Warning: spoilers about the Season 3 finale are below.The actor appears as the troubled character, looking to avenge his murdered father; however, after a series of bad decisions, he ends up killing the man he believed robbed him of his dad — but he turns out to be the one who gave Rick life.Goggins got personal about his own time in Thailand two decades before he began shooting “The White Lotus” Season 3 — and after he went through a trauma almost as disturbing as his character’s fate.The star traveled to the Southeast Asian country “looking for peace, looking for some resolution that was not so dissimilar from what Rick was looking for” after his wife, Leanne Knight, took her own life in 2004, he told Vulture in an interview published on Monday.Goggins explained that while “the circumstances … dramatically different,” he was “as lost as Rick is lost” after Knight’s shocking death.His character tricks his girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), into thinking they’re in Thailand for a couple’s vacation; however, as the season progresses, he confides in her his murderous plot.In the end, Rick’s tunnel vision to take down who he thought was his father’s killer gets him and Chelsea killed.Goggins shared that his personal experience helped him channel Rick.

“I understood, intimately, Rick’s frame of mind,” he noted, adding he and his character needed to discover that “in the depths of our despair, there is always beauty around us.”The “Django Unchained” married his current wife, writer/director Nadia Conners, in 2011.The couple share one child, son Augustus Goggins, 14.This isn’t the first time that Goggins opened up about his first wife’s suicide.

“I spent the next three years looking for an excuse — not to end it, but certainly putting myself in situations that were questionable, not with drugs or anything like tha...