He had been to Thailand before is the thing. He tells me the story early in the afternoon—before we see Augustus, before we go riding, when it’s just us and Lucy out on the back patio of the house, when somehow we start talking about death, what it means to submit to finality, to recalibrate in the face of it.
“I had someone in my life that committed suicide,” he tells me, his voice so quiet my recorder barely caught it, quiet as the sound of his cig burning down, “and she was my wife.”
“It’s a very complicated story,” he says. Her name was Leanne Knight; they were married in 2001, and in 2004 she went missing.
“And ultimately it was revealed the decision that she’d made,” Goggins says, still quiet. “And yeah—I thought it was really unrecoverable for me. Life on the other side of that. And 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 that, just life experiences and traveling. And I really went all over the world.”
He went to Vietnam, Cambodia, eventually India—but he started in Thailand. When he took the White Lotus job around 20 years later, he knew they’d be shooting there—but the full-circle aspect didn’t hit him until they got to the first location.
“The first island we were staying on,” he says, “I realized, I’ve been on this road before. And then the next island we went to, I realized, I’ve definitely been on this beach before. I know this boardwalk. And all of the things kept coming back.”
It all came to a head on Goggins’s last night of shooting, which took place in Bangkok on the banks of the Chao Phraya River.
“We pulled up to this dock, Alex,” Goggins says, “and I was like, I know this dock. What? Okay. Yeah. No. I know this. Oh my God. That’s the room I stayed in 20 years ago. That’s my balcony. That’s where I was the very first day I came here, 20 years ago, and in so much fucking pain, man.
“We got out of the boat,” he says, “and that’s where we were filming, man—all of the equipment was literally right in front of the hotel that I’d picked 20 years ago on the internet, on this little bitty road in this little bitty neighborhood.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I think I haven’t had the time to fully unpack the symmetry between those two people showing up at the same place, separated by 20 years. And a wife and a kid and peace and all the rest of it.”
Did you feel like you were the same guy who’d stood on that balcony?
“I mean, I thought about that on the day,” Goggins says. “I thought, God, I wish I could hug that guy. I wish I could whisper in his ear, You’re going to be okay. Life continues, and it continues for everybody if you can just hold on and lean into it and keep walking the walk that you’re walking, and keep looking for the answers.”
