10 Things Walton Goggins Can’t Live Without

But it is a,

[dog barking]

Lucy!

Come here girl.

That's my dog.

[western music]

What's up GQ?

I'm Walton Goggins, these are my essentials.

This hat, this hat was a gift from my buddy Sam Rockwell,

almost 14 years ago when we were doing this movie

in New Mexico.

He actually got it for himself

and we were at a party one night

and I commented on how much I liked it

and he took it off his head and he put it on my head

and he said, It looks better on you than it does on me,

so why don't you keep it?

And I have kept it for 14 years.

It's a Red Smith Stetson.

It's like a state trooper hat.

And you could see how often I've worn it

because of all that sweat.

And if you've seen me in an airport,

chances are you've seen me wearing this hat.

[soft music]

Wow, look at this.

Who doesn't want to keep a lighter in their pocket?

I happen to live in a house that has seven fireplaces,

so whenever I need to light one, I have it right here.

This lighter is a prop

that I use in the White Lotus Season three.

Now, I chose this slider as an essential

because any actor who's been around for a long time,

you always take a token.

It's because it reminds you of how valuable

that experience was to you.

This particular person that I play

in the White Lotus is very near and dear to my heart

and this is what I chose to take from him.

I can't wait for you to see it

and for you to see how I use it in the show.

You know, what's essential to me is reading.

Books are very, very, very important to me.

I try to have at least one going, if not two at a time.

But I picked a few that are kind of imported to me.

Hermann Hesse, I'm a big fan of .

This is Siddhartha

and keep it on my bedside table.

I also have Steppenwolf close by.

Hemingway, obviously, is a classic.

Maybe you've heard of him.

Movable Feast, we spent a lot of time in Paris

and Hemingway is just someone who's very, very close

to my heart.

But there is no other author

that is more important to me than this guy right here,

W. Somerset Maugham.

The name of this book is The Moon and Sixpence.

It is the one book that I will give any artist as a gift.

I think that this book should be compulsory really

for every artist and every discipline of art

because of what it says about what we do

and how it it's going to come out regardless

of even if you try to suppress it,

art just has to come out.

And I love this book and this author so much that my wife

and I named our son Augustus Somerset Goggins

after Somerset Maugham.

So yeah, pick it up.

[soft music]

Whoa.

This is one of the most essential things in my life.

You know what it is?

It's an orange Sharpie.

And you know why it's essential?

Because this is the only color highlighter that I use

to highlight every script that I have.

And it's really weird, man.

My thoughts, my brain opens up

whenever I see this color on my lines.

I travel with like 20

of these things just in case one of them kind of goes bad.

And I have like four or five in my bag,

in case I leave it in my costume

or something like that.

I'm just gonna put you over here.

Sharpie, don't go anywhere 'cause I'm gonna need you later.

The right story finds the right actor

and finds the right director, and finds the right DP,

and cameraman, and crew, and location,

and all the rest of it.

But you can't do any

of it without this orange Sharpie.

[soft music]

Passport, one of the most essential things in my life

for a variety of reasons.

The only thing I ever really wanted

to do in my life was see the world.

And I dreamed of having a passport that was filled

with stamps from all over the world.

That is indeed what has happened.

This particular passport is my latest one,

and there's stamps on almost every page.

But it's not my first one,

it's my fourth one, my fifth one.

The other reason why it's so important to me is

when I am am not working, I do like to get out

of the country and just go explore.

Favorite places in the world,

I love America.

You know, I do,

I think it's one of the most beautiful countries

in the world.

I love Morocco, India, I love Namibia,

I love South Africa.

I spent some time in Mozambique.

It's one of the greatest pleasures in my life.

Maybe just one of the greatest games

in the world, Backgammon.

This is a travel set that a really good friend

of mine gave to me.

It's this old little vintage Pierre Cardin set.

Oh my god, where has this been?

I've been looking for this for years!

Oh my God, I picked this up,

I didn't even know that this was there.

I swear to God, I've been looking for this

for like four years.

This is a piece of stone that I got in Hanoi.

Unbelievable.

And you know what, these are, these are Scopa cards,

right here, that I got off this card game I was

invited to play in Marrakesh, 22 years ago.

Oh my God, this is amazing!

We just moved to New York, see?

So I just packed in places that would keep it safe.

And I haven't been able to play this game since.

But the game itself is one

of the most important games in the world to me.

Oh my God, I just found something else.

I can't believe it.

This is like, you have no idea.

This is an owl that my wife gave me, a paperweight.

Is there anything else in here?

[dog barking] Oh, I don't know.

There is. Oh my God.

This was a gift from this woman in Namibia.

She was a Himba woman.

It's on my Instagram from when I was there

and she gave me these three stones and I had the other two,

but I didn't know where this one went.

I can't believe this has happened.

It's only because of you, GQ,

that I pulled this thing out

to talk about how important backgammon is to my life.

Hold on, there's one other thing in here.

It's a treasure.

I have no idea what this is.

Oh my God.

These are Christmas ornaments that my mom gave me.

You might shed a tear because I put 'em away

because they mean so much to me.

She gave them to me a while ago,

so I must have packed him in here

'cause I didn't want anything to happen to them.

Like, it's not a game that's essential.

It's the communion that you have with the other person

that you're playing the game with.

And what's essential is what's happening right in here.

I don't know about you guys,

but that's like, I didn't plan this shit.

[soft music]

This watch means a great deal to me

'cause it is the first really nice thing

that I bought myself.

And I thought I was buying it for me,

but as it turns out, not knowing

that I was gonna have a child,

I really kind of bought it for him.

It is a generational gift

and one that you bequeath to your child.

I'm not a watch guy and it's a vintage, it's a Rolex,

and I never took it off my wrist for years

until I got this new watch about three months ago.

But this is one

of the most important things in my life.

You know what this is?

It's a piece of brass,

but it's not just any piece of brass.

Here, give me your hand.

Feel that?

Feels amazing, doesn't it?

No, this is a gift that my wife gave me just as kind

of a reminder of her and our family.

And she gave it to me to take with me on location.

It is something that I carry with me all the time

and it is very, very, very important to my life.

I'm so sorry that all of my essentials are a downer,

[laughing]

like filled with earnest and emotion.

But you know, the things in my life are meaningful to me.

That's why I'm sharing them with you.

[phone buzzing]

You hear that sound?

[soft music]

No, no. I'm not talking about an iPhone.

What I'm talking about is this, right here.

[phone buzzing]

It's the fan app.

I use this fan app every day of my life.

I'm a big napper.

I nap every day, even when I'm working

for the half hour that we have off.

I go straight in. I put on headphones

and I listened to this app.

And how I came across it was I always fell asleep

to fans because of my aunt.

She was an actress in the theater

and it was a really busy apartment that she had

with all these other actors in it.

So her and my uncle would sleep to a fan

and I was staying with them,

and then I got addicted to it.

And I keep it at that distance, believe it or not,

every single day.

And it lulls me to sleep every day, so essential.

White noise is white noise, man.

It's not a fan.

White noise is like the TV

when the programming stopped in the eighties

or seventies, like shhhh.

A fan is like a circular motion.

And somehow this app like mimicked

that sound when it's like about 18 inches from your ear.

And you feel, you get the sensation

as if wind is actually blowing on you.

You might not get it.

And I haven't been doing shrooms, I promise, but I get it.

And I absolutely love it.

[upbeat music]

I didn't travel for a really long time, especially

for the first 10 years I was in Los Angeles

and just kind of starting out as a storyteller.

I just studied and worked and then worked my day job.

And after a decade of doing that,

I finally gave myself permission to go out

and see the world the way that I wanted to see it.

These are just places that I've been

represented in sand and sea shells.

I'll get like a little vessel in whatever country it is.

I'll just find a little place

and then I'll put, you know, some dirt or rocks

or, you know, something from the experience in it.

If you can see that.

This is red sand from Namibia.

This is sand from the Sahara.

Also the Sahara, but from when I was 30 years old.

So it was like 22 years ago.

Sand from a beach in Mozambique.

And this is sand from Tulum.

These are called mermaid dollars

and they're from this little beach

that I found just north of Cape Town.

So these things are essential only to the extent

that they are representative

of great experiences in my life.

[soft music]

Thank you so much for checking out my essentials.

But as we learned, the essentials aren't in objects,

it's in the people that we spend time with

and the places where we choose to go.