When Walton Goggins gets nostalgic, it sounds like he’s confessing to terrible crimes. “Every single time we were over in that part of LA, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I killed somebody there… We arrested this dude here…’” the actor says. “We walk into a restaurant: ‘Oh, this is where we found the drugs, right down here.’”

The star of the new series Fallout is actually pointing out happy memories of his breakthrough days on The Shield, the harrowing 2002–08 drama about a relentlessly corrupt police unit. Goggins played Shane Vendrell, best friend and coconspirator to Michael Chiklis’s überdirty cop Vic Mackey. Goggins had been a struggling actor for a decade before the show, subsisting on guest parts in series like JAG and NYPD Blue, and small roles in movies like The Next Karate Kid and Shanghai Noon. Much of his income in the early days, however, came from parking cars as a valet.

“We would drive down Ventura Boulevard, and I would tell my wife every single time we passed The Great Greek or the Moonlight Tango, when it was still there, or Cha Cha Cha: ‘This is where I worked…’ ‘That was my key box, right there …’  ‘I was reading Shakespeare here, to try to get rid of my accent…’” says the actor, who was born in Alabama but raised in Georgia. 

That accent ultimately served him well: Goggins found a lot of early work playing all manner of good ol’ boys. “I was very grateful and very lucky to have been from the South, so at least there was a stereotype that I could play. A box that I could fit in,” he says. Some of those characters were salt of the earth. Many were more complicated than their homespun exteriors, and quite a few more were twisted monstrosities. 

In Fallout, the apocalyptic new show debuting on Amazon’s Prime Video on Thursday, Goggins walks on both the light and the dark side. For much of the series, he is the Ghoul, a centuries-old, immortal bounty hunter who has become adept at surviving in a dead-end world. But in flashbacks, he is the man the Ghoul used to be: Cooper Howard, a kindhearted father and husband who earned his living as a Gene Autry–like cowboy actor in Hollywood before the nuclear bombs began to fall. 

At one point in the show, adapted by Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy from the mega popular Fallout video game series, the Ghoul finds a discarded tape of an old Cooper Howard Western called The Man from Deadhorse. The scarred, noseless creature sits transfixed as he beholds images of his former self.

The Ghoul and Goggins wouldn’t seem to have a lot in common, but both become unexpectedly overwhelmed when looking back at where they started. In the midst of talking about his hardscrabble beginnings, Goggins rubs his watering eyes. His voice breaks as he chokes up. “Man, talking about this shit… ”

“I hope that people still have the opportunity to walk the path that I walked, because I wouldn’t have had it any different. I mean, I’m not Mark Ruffalo. I’m not Brad Pitt. I’m not Sam Rockwell, one of my best friends. But I don’t envy anyone else’s career,” Goggins says. “I feel like someone always gave me the opportunity that I needed at the time I needed it. Maybe that’s why everything that I do, whether it’s good or whether it’s not good, I put my heart into it. I love it. And I can’t believe I’m fucking emotional in front of you, man.”

Walton Goggins’s origin story follows a familiar Hollywood trope: a kid from the heartland travels to California to become an actor. In his late teens, he’d had a small role in the 1990 civil rights TV movie Murder in Mississippi and played high school kids in a handful of episodes of the police drama In the Heat of the Night, both of which shot in Georgia. After a year at Georgia Southern University, he decided to go where movie and TV roles were more plentiful.

“I moved to Los Angeles when I was 19 years old in 1991 with $300 in my pocket, and I didn’t really know anyone,” he says. Goggins got a part-time job that paid minimum wage (then $4.25 an hour), opening an LA Fitness gym at 5 a.m. and clocking out four hours later. That left plenty of time to pursue auditions, but didn’t provide enough income to last very long in one of the nation’s most expensive cities.

“I couldn’t work in a restaurant because I’m not good at having people tell me what to do,” Goggins says. “This isn’t a therapy session, but that goes back to my childhood. I couldn’t have somebody say, ‘Could you give me some tea?’ ‘No, you fucking get up and go get yourself some tea.”

His goal was to pay not just the rent, but also pay for acting classes. Goggins signed up to hone his skills under the guidance of legendary coach Harry Mastrogeorge, who had trained Ray Liotta, Melanie Griffith, Bryan Cranston, Daryl Hannah, and Djimon Hounsou, among many others. 

Goggins got a bit part on a 1992 episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 and played roles like “Young Man #1” in the 1993 Halle Berry miniseries Queen. But those weren’t going to keep him afloat either. “I said, ‘Well, fuck this. I know valet parking.’ I did that during college and I made a shitload of money doing it,” Goggins said. “I can be accused of not being a lot of things, I suppose, but audacious isn’t one of them. I am an audacious person.”

So he put on a performance of sorts: “[I had] the audacity to walk down Ventura Boulevard with a three-piece suit and a shitty briefcase that I got as a graduation present and just walk into these restaurants, these big restaurants, to say, ‘Hello, how are you? My name is Walton Goggins. I’m from Atlanta, Georgia—just moved here. I see that you have valet parking. I’d like to bid for your business.’ And when they say, ‘Get out of here,’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think you understand. There’s a level of personal attention that I will give to you and to a restaurant…’  ‘Do you have insurance?’ ‘Yes, of course I have insurance!’… I had no fucking insurance at all, but I would get it.”

For several years, he ran the business with three other actors, overseeing parking for as many as nine restaurants. “The goal was to have our freedom,” he says. “I was in class when I wasn’t working, and we all covered each other’s shifts.”

His first feature film role was as an unnamed “shaky kid” in the 1992 showbiz comedy Mr. Saturday Night, directed by and starring Billy Crystal. Goggins’s moment was cut from the film, but it ended up amid the extra features on the home video release. Like the Ghoul finding that old Cooper Howard movie, Goggins describes getting his hand on the tape to see his first (almost) movie role: “I’ll never forget when I rented it from Blockbuster and I saw it for the first time, I started crying. There it is. The scene is there.”

Years later—after Goggins became known for his work on The Shield and as the scene-stealing villain Boyd Crowder on the 2010–2015 series Justified—he ran into Crystal again at a Broadway performance of All the Way. “I went to see [Bryan] Cranston do Lyndon Johnson, right? And I walked in and Billy was sitting there,” Goggins recalled. “He said, ‘Hey, Nervous Kid! Don’t forget I gave you your first job!’”

A long list of small parts and background roles followed. “The thing that really kind of changed for me was the day that I got a phone call and a message on my machine from Robert Duvall, saying ‘Hey Walton, it’s Bobby D! Hey, I want you. You’re going to do this role.’ And I got The Apostle.”

The 1997 drama, written and directed by Duvall, featured the Tender Mercies Oscar-winner as a fugitive who starts a new life as a revivalist preacher. A 25-year-old Goggins costarred as a young true believer who had a handful of scene-stealing moments. “That was a big deal,” Goggins said. “I remember being at the premiere in Toronto with my manager and somebody leaning over and saying, ‘Hey man, your life’s about to change.’”

It didn’t, not right away. Goggins got bigger roles in lesser movies, like a supporting part as a home-run champ in the third Major League movie in 1998, and a second-tier villain in the third film in The Crow series, released in 2000. 

Then came the breakthrough: The Shield, a juicy part in a series that would establish a new bar for cable dramas alongside other shows from the era, like The Sopranos and The Wire. But that one almost slipped away. His character was in constant danger and so was the actor who played him.

“I wasn’t a guy they would ever put on fucking network television, ever. And then The Shield came along, and it was only because of [creator] Shawn Ryan and [pilot director] Clark Johnson and [director-producer] Scott Brazil that that happened,” Goggins recalled. “Even after doing the first episode, FX wanted to fire me at that time.”

Why? “I don’t know, man,” Goggins says. “I only had three fucking lines in the pilot. It was something about me they didn’t like. But to their credit, they said, ‘Okay, we believe in you, Shawn.’ Shawn wrote the second episode, and there was a lot that Shane Vendrell was going through. And at the end of that, they said, ‘You know what? Sorry, we made a mistake. He’s our guy.’”

Goggins had the power to make audiences care, even if the detective he was playing was utterly deplorable at times—culminating in an ending that is both nauseating and heart-crushing. He worked the same conflicted magic as the long-running nemesis of Timothy Olyphant’s US Deputy Marshal on another FX crime saga, Justified.

Along the way, Quentin Tarantino handed him dastardly figures to sink his teeth into in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, Steven Spielberg cast him as the conflicted congressman Clay Hawkins in Lincoln, and he turned up repeatedly as the sweet-natured trans prostitute Venus Van Dam in the biker series Sons of Anarchy, created by former Shield writer-producer Kurt Sutter. He showed his comedic side in the shows Vice Principals, The Unicorn, and The Righteous Gemstones, and played prominent villains in the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot and Ant-Man and the Wasp. 

For a long time, Goggins had a face people recognized, even if they didn’t know his name. Now he has the name-recognition too. Fallout is the culmination of more than 30 years of work—a star turn in a big-budget series, released on a top streaming platform and based on a globally beloved game. Still, he can’t help but feel a type of kinship with the Ghoul.

Cooper Howard and his apocalyptic alter-ego are the bookends for the world of Fallout, which was frozen in time after nuclear war decimated the planet. Ella Purnell costars as a naive “vault dweller” whose people led a safe, privileged life underground for many generations, while Aaron Moten is a duplicitous low-level soldier from a militarized, quasi-religious order called The Brotherhood of Steel. Think of Purnell as “the good,” Moten as “the bad,” and Goggins as “the ugly”—although they sometimes trade off those traits as the story progresses.

The Ghoul has lived through all of it, although his memories of being Cooper Howard, who witnessed the falling of the bombs, has faded over time. A cityscape full of mushroom clouds and decades upon decades in the blistering wasteland will do that.

“Walton’s character, when we first meet him in the end of his world, is a somewhat reduced movie star, or a movie star that’s been reduced to playing kids’ birthday parties,” says Nolan, the showrunner of Fallout as well as cowriter of The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar with his filmmaker brother, Christopher Nolan. “The question is, how did that come to be? What happened to his life? He’s sort of our guide to the world that ended. And we come to understand by the end of the first episode that somehow he has survived. ‘Survived’ is maybe the wrong word. Somehow, he’s endured.”

Jonathan Nolan says Goggins plays the role of Cooper Howard earnestly in the flashbacks, while the Ghoul is “a parody” of the tough-talking roughrider the character once played in the movies. “It’s like when your mom says, ‘Stop making that face, it’ll get stuck that way,’” Nolan says.

For the flashback scenes, Goggins modeled his performance on retro cowboy stars John Wayne and James Arness. “I was thinking about how elegant they were, and how charismatic and simple they were in their presentation, and their humble beginnings,” he said. “I thought, Yeah, okay, I have that in my own life. None of this was ever supposed to happen to someone like me. My mother made $12,000 a year. I grew up in a little farmhouse. You had to walk through my bedroom to get to the bathroom. And that’s all I knew.” 

It can be hard to see that old version of himself from where he is now. But zeroing in on Cooper Howard meant looking back at his own experiences—and similar choices. “I had to understand who Cooper Howard was before I understood who the Ghoul was,” Goggins says. “All I ever really wanted was to see the world, which I think Cooper wanted. I don’t think he came there to be an actor. I think he was probably a stunt man that had some charisma and people liked him, said, ‘Why don’t you say this line?’ And he did. And it’s like, Wow, people like that! ‘Let’s do a screen test.’ And there he is—and then he’s a commodity.”

“I’ve had a version of that in my own life,” the actor adds. “Simultaneously, I have experienced great trauma in my life, and I was a different person on the other side of that. No different than the dropping of the bombs, metaphorically speaking in one’s own journey. There’s another chapter, two chapters or three chapters, yet to be written in the Ghoul’s life. And I feel the same about mine.” That may be why the memories of cars he once parked and crooks he once offed on The Shield evoke such strong emotions. 

Goggins, his wife, and their son no longer live in Los Angeles; instead, they make their home in upstate New York. On their last day as Californians, Goggins and his wife visited Sunset Boulevard, and did a very non–Los Angeles thing. “I said, ‘We’re not taking the car, man. Let’s fucking walk.’ And in this 10 block radius, I just pointed out on this corner is where this happened. On that corner is where that happened. There are ghosts on every corner that represent my journey as a human being, let alone an actor,” Goggins says.

Unlike the Ghoul, he doesn’t have to watch his old tapes to be reminded. “It’s there every day on the streets in front of me. And we’re all living all of those lives simultaneously, aren't we? I mean, they’re all a part of who we are on any given day.”