Over an English breakfast tea – and midway through a cigarette – at a West Village cafe, Walton Goggins is enjoying a rare break after a 16-month period of non-stop work and intense travel. Thailand for The White Lotus, Utah for Fallout and, occasionally, his home – 125 acres in Upstate New York, which he calls “God’s living room”. While we are undeniably in the era of Goggins, the actor speaks with the humility of a veteran performer who believes this could all slip away at any moment.

“I think I’m a pretty accessible person,” he says. “My position in the world is, ‘I wanna drink with that guy.’” (True to his word, our interview is interrupted by a quartet of tourists from Atlanta who are huge fans. He receives them with genteel grace.)

Having been acting since the 1990s, his CV includes some of the most acclaimed dramas of the new millennium: a wildcard cop in The Shield, a transgender sex worker on Sons Of Anarchy, a wily ex-con on Justified. These roles established the Walton Goggins type – Southern, squirrelly, perhaps a little shady.

But now, in his fifties, Goggins is suddenly enjoying a career renaissance, thanks to a trio of projects that have expanded the range of what we see him do on screen. On Fallout, he’s an undead Ghoul roaming a post-apocalyptic West, a performance that earned him an Emmy nomination, as well as numerous fans who couldn’t understand why they were crushing on a walking corpse. On The Righteous Gemstones, he gets to cut loose as Uncle Baby Billy, an older former child star who casts himself as teenage Jesus in a project called, naturally, “Teenjus”.

Then there was The White Lotus, which he knew was going to be big – but he wasn’t prepared for just how much it would change things. Before signing on to the third season of Mike White’s cult anthology, he felt prepared to take the show deeper and darker than it had gone before. Goggins starred as Rick Hatchett, a doomed wanderer trapped in an endless cycle of vengeance and pain. But afterwards, he found the experience was something he couldn’t shake. “It took me almost six and a half months to smile,” he says.

In a stacked cast full of meme-worthy performances, Rick was the biggest breakout, and he opened doors for Goggins in ways the actor couldn’t have dreamed of. In May, he walked the Met Gala red carpet as a guest of Thom Browne, in a stunning deconstructed suit and skirt. The following weekend, he hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time, poking affable fun at his status as a middle-aged heartthrob. It seems he may be leaving the character-actor label behind for good. The world has woken up to the fact that Walton Goggins is a star.

An essential part of Goggins’ process is treating his characters as if they are real people out in the world. “I have to believe that I can drive up to this person’s house.” But diving into Rick’s psyche on The White Lotus affected him in ways that had nothing to do with his newfound level of fame. “Playing this guy opened my heart in ways that I didn’t expect.”

Goggins has spoken openly about the fact that, in returning to Thailand, he was retracing a path from decades earlier, when he visited the country lost in grief after the death of his first wife. Through Rick came the realisation that he had processed that trauma. “You carry it, because it gives you your identity. It’s something to talk about,” he says. “But I don’t need to have those conversations anymore. It will always be part of my experience, but I don’t carry it with me to the degree that I felt I needed to before. Which is fucking extraordinary.”

On The White Lotus, Rick is so consumed with the love he never got from his absent father that he neglects the love staring him in the face. For Goggins, the character’s struggle mirrored his own difficulties in relationships. “I can give love. But receiving it? That’s a whole different muscle. You can get married, you can hold hands – I’ve done both of those things a couple times in my life. But it wasn’t until I looked at his experience and thought, this is the one thing that I’ve never been capable of doing. And I’m just gonna do it.”

But a place he doesn’t have trouble accepting love is in his relationship with his son, 14-year-old Augustus. “He’s been giving me love in a way I never anticipated,” he says. When Goggins is away, Augustus wears his clothes. “He said, ‘I’m a lot like you, Dad. I like the way you move through the world. I like the way you present yourself.’ Whether he changes, or grows out of that… I mean, that’s love,” Goggins says. “But still – don’t wear my Gucci jacket!”

Rick became a fashion icon with his aloha shirt-filled wardrobe and brought Goggins more opportunities to show off his own inimitable sense of fashion. “My style has been the style that I could afford at the time, but it was always my style, and it was always unique. It’s evolved over time, from being able to afford nicer things, but it’s never changed – it’s a curation of the finer things.”

He treasures two pairs of Maison Margiela shoes that he bought 14 years ago. “They’re literally sewn together because they’ve been torn so many times,” he says. “But they’re quality. It isn’t about renting a fucking automobile and showing up at a party. It’s about living in the world.”

He brought the same mindset to Saturday Night Live and the Met Gala, where he had only one instruction to his collaborators: “Use me.” At SNL, he was willing to go for the writers’ most out-there sketches – one about tiny baby shoes, another about a man discovering his boss uses a Squatty Potty. “The greatest advice I was given is that you’re a guest in their house,” he says. “And I’m from the South. So, being a guest in someone’s house, nobody does it better than me.”

A similar ethos prevailed when Goggins was prepping for the Met Gala with the Thom Browne team. “They asked me what my thoughts were and I said, ‘My thoughts are irrelevant. You express yourself and I’ll wear the fuck out of it.’”

In his SNL monologue, Goggins joked about the backhanded articles that had heralded his rise. (One example: “Hollywood’s Newest Heartthrob Is A Greasy, Depressing Man Whom No One Saw Coming”.) Those headlines have become a frequent joke among his friends. “This is what being a 53-year-old sex symbol has looked like for me,” he says. “It’s like, ‘I wanna fuck this guy, but I don’t know why.’”

If anyone is well attuned with his charisma, it’s his latest director, Nadia Conners, who also happens to be his wife of 14 years. The couple met on a blind date that Goggins didn’t know was a blind date. “It was a business dinner. In walks this beautiful woman. She came right up to me, sat down, turned her back to the entire table full of people and said, ‘Let’s get into it.’ And we began this conversation that’s still going on 20 years later.”

Working together on The Uninvited – an indie in the guise of a Hollywood satire that soon shifts into a meditation of ageing, motherhood and death – felt a natural fit. Goggins plays the husband to Elizabeth Reaser’s actor, a talent agent undergoing a career crisis. While Goggins’ usual routine to decompress after a day on set is to sit with a cocktail and some music, the post-shoot looked different here. “We never really stepped out of it,” he says. “But it was so joyful to come home and say, ‘Are you ready to go back out there tomorrow? What’s your plan?’ Talking about story is a big part of our relationship.”

The film also gave him the opportunity to work with Pedro Pascal, who plays his romantic rival. In real life, they are close friends, having met through Sam Rockwell, another pal-turned-co-star of Goggins’. “During Covid, we hung out quite a bit: social-distanced in the backyard, talking and sitting on beaches. [Pedro’s] got a great sense of humour. He’s a great storyteller. He’s just a good fucking human being.”

Up next, Goggins is circling a psychological horror movie and a foreign-language film currently under wraps. “There are things that I didn’t know that I wanted to do that, now that they’ve come my way, I realise are things I’ve always wanted to do.”

He doesn’t know if he would have been able to handle the sudden rush of fame he’s been experiencing had it come two decades earlier. “We’ve been walking on this road for such a long time… We’re able to stop and smell the roses, see the topography of the road has changed.” And know that, though “the landscape has changed, nothing changes for you”.

To everything there is a season, and he is enjoying the season of Walton Goggins right now. “People are just having a good time, and it will last as long as it will last.”

After our conversation, he’ll head off on a much-deserved vacation in Greece. And from his perspective, success at this level is just another foreign land.

“It’s like I’m travelling to a country that I’ve never been to before. I’m just looking around and letting it all come in.”