• Faith: Spirituality
• Career: Actor
• Birthday:  November 10, 1971

Walton Goggins was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Lithia Springs, a small town in Georgia about 15 miles west of Atlanta. After a year studying at Georgia Southern University, Goggins moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked jobs while taking acting classes and picking up acting roles. During this time, he worked at LA Fitness and as a valet.

Being from the South, Goggins was often cast in roles that reinforce stereotypes many people have of rural southerners. Goggins used his acting career to subvert stereotypes, such as when he played Boyd Crowder in the Justified series, which premiered in 2010. The role allowed him to portray rural Americans positively and authentically. In 2011, he married Hollywood writer and director Nadia Conners. The couple has one son together. Goggins went on to star in films like Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015), The White Lotus series, and currently plays the Ghoul in Amazon's Fallout show. After the show premiered, IGN announced in October 2025 that Goggins would voice the Ghoul in Fallout 76's Burning Springs Expansion.

Is Walter Goggins Religious?

Although Goggins describes himself as a secular individual, he is no stranger to religion and is at the same time deeply spiritual. Goggins attended various churches growing up in Georgia, several of which were Pentecostal and nondenominational. He vividly remembers the powerful spiritual experiences that characterize Pentecostal services. These experiences would shape his future life and experience with spirituality. But his spiritual journey was not limited to Christianity.

He describes his mother, a follower of the Hindu yogi Paramhansa Yogananda, as a "forward-thinking spiritualist." His mother introduced him to esoteric books about spirituality. From his preteen years into early adulthood, Goggins read Joel Goldsmith and texts such as the Urantia Book. The Urantia papers were first published in 1955 and purport to be authored by celestial beings.

Goggins's spiritual journey is often echoed in his roles. In Them That Follow, his role as snake-handling Appalachian pastor Lemuel Childs was a sober nod to Goggins's childhood years in the churches of Georgia. In The White Lotus, Goggins's character, Rick Hatchett, is a spiritual seeker who travels to Thailand in the third season. Goggins traveled to Thailand in 2007 amidst severe trauma. This trip was the beginning of a three-year search for meaning. In the third season, there are scenes where Goggins's character Hatchett meditates. In these scenes, Goggins draws on his three-decade practice of meditation and presence.

His lifelong spiritual journey ultimately points, in Goggins's eyes, towards a pursuit of authenticity, forgiveness, and compassion. He sees the purpose of spirituality as falling in love with oneself. Goggins has described this love as the ability to forgive himself and those who have hurt him, as well as to live life with compassion for others. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Goggins mentions that surrender is a common motif in religion. But given his interpretation of spiritual exercise, he asks what it means to surrender to oneself and to one's true nature.