I listen to music cinematically. I think about music and how it would make me feel when it's put to an image, a moving image, and I love it.
I quite like antiques. I like things that are old and the history they bring with them. I would rather fly to Morocco on an $800 ticket and buy a chair for $300 than spend $1,100 on one at Pottery Barn.
Acting is a child's game. It's your willingness to suspend one reality and substitute it for another. That reality lives and breathes in your imagination. The actors that I want to be like exercise that way of thinking, and that's kind of what I do.
There is something beautiful and permanent in the world, and that is the love that a person can have for another human being.
I like storytelling, and I feel more confident as the years have gone on about my ability to do that.
My heroes are Robert Duvall, Forest Whitaker, Ed Harris, Tommy Lee Jones, Anthony Hopkins and Sean Penn.
It's about something that I'm extremely passionate about: exploring other cultures, how Americans are perceived by other cultures and how we perceive other cultures through our worldview. I travel whenever I get an opportunity to do so, and I think this country is ready for a show on television that is bilingual and really puts front and center another culture, both as the protagonist and the antagonist.
But probably my favorite music, believe it or not, is sad music.
I think I'm much too earnest to be as cool as 'Boyd Crowder'.
Sadly, in this country - maybe this is in the history of the world, really - it's the urban experience versus the bucolic experience. And it is different, but therein lies the slow progression of democracy. We are a melting pot.
An actor that tells you that they have real choices between material is, for the most part, lying. There are very few people that have opportunities. But what you do have where I am in my career, is saying no to the things that seem repetitious. For me, I always look for material that allows me to bring my worldview to it. And those opportunities, since the beginning of The Shield, have grown exponentially.
Whenever you show up on a set where you haven't been from the beginning - at least myself - I'm kind of quiet. I just watch the politics and how everything unfolds. It's kind of like going to a new high school. You want to see who everyone is before you introduce yourself, really, to kind of make friends. I think any smart person does that in social situations
Maybe when you're alone or no one's looking, you dare to think, "Maybe someday I could get to work with somebody like Quentin Tarantino." For me, it happened. And it didn't just happen once, it's happened twice.
For violent people to make themselves vulnerable, and then to have that vulnerability be used against them, bad things can happen.
When you get the call from Quentin Tarantino, it's the call of a lifetime. You don't allow yourself to be vulnerable enough or to be fool enough to expect that phone call to happen, in reality.
I take it as a real compliment that people believe that I can in some ways mine the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the somewhat off-center - psychologically speaking - people in our society, and bring a real humanity to them, and make people see what would otherwise be a person that you would hate. Find a reason to love them and see the world from their point of view.
With a lot of the movies that I've done, they've been both dramas and comedies from Shanghai Noon to Billy Bob Thornton's second movie, Daddy and Them, to just a bunch of movies that I have done have been comic, and they're usually from a cynical kind of pessimistic point of view which is probably my sense of humor, and this is a part of myself in everybody that I play.
T I was doing Predators, this new movie for FOX simultaneously, and this character that I play in the movie is "Walter Stands," and I had a plethora of ink all up and down my skin.Once you have ink on your body, how it informs you as an actor, and you kind of get in that space and occupy that space of that character, when you're without them, when I'm just Walton Goggins in the world and I'm without my tattoos, I feel a little naked.
Success in TV-showmaking is just a matter of being authentic and doing the best you can, and you hope that people watch it and like it. For us [showmakers], we know where our bread is buttered, and we live by the written word of the critic. That's how shows build a critical mass on cable.
I find that I have no problem getting a table at a restaurant when I walk in.
I never fancied myself having a prejudice towards people with tattoos. I personally don't have any and I don't think that I do, but I do see that people treat me differently with tattoos. People get out of my way.
I think Hollywood sees so many parts of America through a very narrow prism. The South is no exception. And those stereotypes, while sometimes true, are exaggerated for me to the point of boredom.
Whenever you show up on a set where you haven't been from the beginning - at least myself - I'm kind of quiet. I just watch the politics and how everything unfolds.
I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.
Like everybody, I've had a lot of pain in my life and I'm a work in progress. You must have a true desire to see the world from a different point of view, and that comes with growing up.
