VARIETY Cover: Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood on THE WHITE LOTUS, Their Rumored Feud and More

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In a new Extra Edition cover story for VARIETY, Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood speak with Senior TV Features Editor Emily Longretta about THE WHITE LOTUS, their rumored feud, Goggins’ New York Times interview, Goggins unfollowing Wood on Instagram, a cut love scene, and more.

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Goggins on the feud rumors: “There is no feud. I adore, I love this woman madly, and she is so important to me,” he says, getting choked up. Goggins turns to look at Wood. “This is Goldie Hawn. This is Meg Ryan. She can do anything, and she will. You watch what the next 20 years of her experience will be. I’ll be on an island, I think Greece. But she’s special. There is no feud. She is love and I know that I am that to her. We care about each other very deeply.”

Goggins on the controversial New York Times interview: The Times interview wasn’t the time for the discussion, he says, first because Wood wasn’t there. “What am I gonna do, speak for both of us? Never.”

Goggins says the reporter asked three different times about Wood and had a “divisive nature.” The last question, he says, compared Goggins’ teeth to Wood’s, asking if they’d bonded over that.

“What he was insinuating, it was so disgusting. It was so appalling. I was flabbergasted. And I said, ‘Fuck mate, wow. I think we’re done here,’” Goggins says.

Goggins on unfollowing Wood on Instagram: “I think it’s such a comment on where we’re at culturally. Why is everyone obsessing over Instagram? That is irrelevant. We don’t give a shite about Instagram,” she says. “Why not have conversations about the story and Rick and Chelsea and enjoy it?”

“My catharsis in this experience was different than other people’s, because of my history in this place. I knew what we had gone through, and I knew how close that we had gotten, and I needed to begin to process saying goodbye to Rick and Chelsea,” Goggins says, beginning to cry. “And I knew that that was going to take a while for me, so I let her know, this is what I’ve gotta do. And she was extremely supportive about that.”

After filming ended, “I needed to just back away from everyone,” he says. “I haven’t spoken to anyone. I couldn’t handle it. Judge me or don’t. I don’t give a fuck what you think. This is my process. Rick means everything to me, and Chelsea means everything to me. And so that’s what I needed to do for me to process all of this.”

He jokes that if he had been following Olyphant or his “The Shield” co-star Michael Chiklis, he would have unfollowed them after those shows wrapped, too.

“You know what?” Goggins laughs and gets up. “I’ll follow you right now!” He heads across the room to find his phone, coming back to sit with Wood. He opens Instagram and becomes one of her 3 million followers.

“It’s all so ridiculous,” he says. “It’s just a part of me just saying goodbye to this character so that now Aimee and I will be friends for fucking ever.”

Wood and Goggins on the love scene that was cut: “We designed the whole journey, even down to the fact that Chelsea gets on Rick in the first [love] scene. Then in the last episode, it was Rick picking Chelsea up. It was so, so delicate,” Wood recalls.

Goggins echoes her. While the first love scene showed their connection, “the last one was two people who were free. It was this very long, suspended moment of these two people looking at each other. It was so powerful.”

With that, he picks up my recorder and yells a message for creator Mike White: “Fuck you, Mike! We want a director’s cut!”

[Photo Credit: Dan Doperalski for Variety Magazine]

• Aimee Lou Wood
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• Walton Goggins