Warning: This article contains spoilers for The White Lotus season 3, episode 5, “Full-Moon Party.”
When Sam Rockwell showed up on this week’s episode of The White Lotus, his character Frank delivered a nearly-five-minute, shocking monologue that left his longtime friend Rick (Walton Goggins) absolutely wide-eyed and slack-jawed. And according to Goggins, he felt exactly the same as his character leading up to filming that WTF moment with his real-life best friend Rockwell.
“I read it when I first read all the scripts two or three months before we started filming, and I was so blown away by [creator] Mike White and what he has to say about the world and these people, and really all of us, through this monologue,” Goggins tells Entertainment Weekly. “I just read it over and over and over and over and over again. And when Sam signed on — Sam is one of my best friends, and Leslie [Bibb], his partner is also one of my best friends — I was nervous that Sam was going to do it, and relieved that Sam was going to do it.”
Sam Rockwell, ‘The White Lotus’. Courtesy of HBO
The monologue in question features Rick learning just how much his friend Frank has changed in the years since they last saw each other. Formerly a hard partier, Frank is now sober, Buddhist, and totally open about his sex addiction that became an identity crisis when he moved to Thailand and wanted to become the Asian girls he was so attracted to. Rick attempts to listen to his friend’s vulnerable confession without reacting, but he can’t hide his facial expressions as Frank describes the progression of having sex with ladyboys which turned into hiring white men who looked like him to have sex with him while he made himself look like a “ladyboy,” over and over again. “Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” Frank wondered. “I don’t know. Guess I was trying to f— my way to the answer. Then I realized I’ve got to stop the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl, I got into Buddhism.”
Goggins knew how vital this scene was for Rick’s own journey, but knowing his scene partner Rockwell so well was both a blessing and a curse as he prepared to film. “We know each other’s ticks, and he’s my hero, I don’t want to let him down,” Goggins says. “But I want to play with him. And two minutes into the first conversation we had, it was like, ‘Ohhhh, okay, now we can go anywhere, now we can do anything. It was the best time that I had really working on all of The White Lotus, working with him and those scenes.”
Throughout the first four episodes, Rick is so emotionally stunted, even as his younger girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) desperately tries to bring anything out of him. Finally, peeling back the layers of Rick through this interaction with Frank allowed Goggins to really start understanding who he is.
“It was a shorthand and a history, hopefully, that plays itself out when you see them together,” Goggins explains. “And all of a sudden this taciturn person steeped in this pain — he barely talks to anyone, no one…. Rick has no one but Chelsea, the love of his life that he can’t even f—ing speak to until it’s nighttime, until they’re connecting on their soul level. And all of a sudden when Rick comes into this experience with Frank, it’s like the dude has a personality. The dude can talk!”
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Goggins laughs at how, all of a sudden, Rick is finally acting like a real human being (Chelsea would be delighted, if she only knew). “The dude is really interested in someone else and wants to hear about how somebody else is doing,” he adds. “It’s meeting a completely different person. And to get that opportunity to go through that experience with Sam, who literally is the best of my generation, was just one of the greatest joys of my life, and [I loved] what that monologue is saying about Buddhism and about spirituality and about letting go of lust and the trappings of this world and transitioning into a greater, deeper meaning and relationship to the world.”
While Rick and Frank’s initial meeting (and that monologue) already has fans going wild, Goggins teases that there’s much more to come. “You just have to see what happens, man!” he says with a laugh. “Everybody else’s story has kind of come online, and Rick’s is kind of coming, and then when it happens, it just f—ing happens, and chaos reigns supreme. And there is a message in there for all of us and Frank and their friendship and going through it together and Chelsea. It’s quite something.”
The White Lotus season 3 airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.
