Walton Sanders Goggins Jr. (born November 10, 1971) is an American actor. He has starred in various television series, including The Shield (2002–2008), Justified (2010–2015), Vice Principals (2016–2017), The Righteous Gemstones (2019–2025), Invincible (2021–present), Fallout (2024–present), and The White Lotus (2025). He was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for Justified and The White Lotus, and for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Fallout.
Goggins starred in and co-produced the Academy Award–winning short film The Accountant (2001). He has also had significant roles in feature films, such as Predators (2010), The Hateful Eight (2015), Tomb Raider (2018), Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), and Fatman (2020) among others.
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Early life
Goggins was born on November 10, 1971, in Birmingham, Alabama, the son of Janet Long and Walton Goggins Sr. He was raised in Lithia Springs, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. He attended and graduated from Lithia Springs High School, and then attended Georgia Southern University for a year. He is a descendant of the Irish high king Niall of the Nine Hostages.
As he has described in interviews, a young Goggins twice had two front teeth knocked out: first, as a fifth-grader at sports practice in 1979, when he was accidentally struck in the mouth by a baseball, and after their successful reinsertion, a year and a half later he knocked them out again after hitting his face diving into a pool's shallow end. He then spent his high school years wearing a removable dental bridge (something he says he used to comic effect).
Career
Goggins moved to Los Angeles at nineteen, working at LA Fitness and a valet parking business while taking acting classes and auditioning. After starring in a few roles in Georgia, he met Ray McKinnon while filming Murder in Mississippi.
Goggins played Shane Vendrell in the FX drama series The Shield. He formed the production company Ginny Mule Pictures, which produced four films: The Accountant (a short film which won an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film), Chrystal (Sundance Dramatic Competition), Randy and the Mob, and That Evening Sun (which won the South by Southwest Special Jury Prize). They later created the drama series Rectify. Goggins was set to play the lead and AMC had bought the pilot script, written by McKinnon, a role which went to Aden Young, when the series later went to Sundance TV.
Goggins had a major supporting role as a deadly death row inmate being hunted by the titular antagonists in the film Predators. He played Boyd Crowder in the pilot episode for the FX drama series Justified. Before Goggins was cast, Boyd was intended to die in the pilot episode, but Graham Yost kept the character when the character scored highly with test audiences. Goggins joined the main cast for the second season in May 2010. He was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his role on Justified. In 2011, he appeared in "Code of the West", a commercial for Ram Truck's "Guts & Glory" campaign. He appeared in Cowboys & Aliens as Hunt, a bandit formerly in the employ of the protagonist. He played a sadistic overseer and slave fighting trainer in the western film Django Unchained.
Goggins played a transgender sex worker in the FX drama series Sons of Anarchy. He previously worked with the show's creator, Kurt Sutter, when the latter was a writer and executive producer on The Shield. The name "Venus Van Dam" is a play on the undercover name "Cletus Van Damme" used by The Shield character Shane Vendrell. He played Chris Mannix in The Hateful Eight and Lee Russell in the HBO dark comedy series Vice Principals. The New York Times critic Mike Hale wrote, "Walton Goggins makes a habit of being the best thing about the television shows he's in."
In 2018, Goggins played Lawrence in Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Mathias Vogel in Tomb Raider, and Sonny Burch in Ant-Man and the Wasp. That same year, he made a guest appearance in the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory as a jealous husband. In 2019, he played the lead character in the CBS sitcom The Unicorn and starred in the comedy series The Righteous Gemstones, alongside Vice Principals costar Danny McBride. In 2020, Goggins voiced part of the true crime podcast Deep Cover: The Drug Wars.
Advertising
Goggins has been prolific in appearing in television commercials across his career, including for Walmart and, in a Super Bowl ad spot, promoting GoDaddy and his own goggle glasses line. Regarding commercial acting, Goggins told People: "When we did the Super Bowl commercial for Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses, what I found so rewarding was being given the opportunity to step into this space and embrace the challenge and the creativity of telling a story in 15 seconds, 30 seconds or in 60 seconds." Goggins said that, before working more seriously in advertising, he received advice on this area of work from Samuel L. Jackson.
Personal life
In 2001, Goggins married Leanne Knight. Although estranged, they remained married until she died by suicide on November 12, 2004. Goggins married filmmaker Nadia Conners in August 2011 and they have a son together, born the same year.
