Walton Goggins: Birmingham native, creator of memorable characters may be my favorite actor

I am in TV heaven, because now I can get my full Walton Goggins fix on FX. The show in which he co-stars, “Justified,” started its fifth season Tuesday on the cable network, FX. Goggins may be my favorite actor.

The Birmingham native plays Boyd Crowder, a golden-tongued bad boy on the show, which is set in the Kentucky hills where dead-end lives are fertile fields for crime. As played by Goggins, Crowder grew up ambitious and clever, later leveraging his experiences as a combat vet to put some education behind that intelligence (not to mention caps on bad teeth).

Walton Goggins as 'Boyd Crowder'

Take this scene (memorialized on the website IMDb), from an episode last season. Crowder is confronted by a Detroit mobster, Nicky Augustine, who is looking for a man hiding out near Crowder’s home in fictional Harlan County, Ky.

"Nicky Augustine: I got to ask. Where'd you get all those teeth?
Boyd Crowder: Courtesy of the American taxpayer while serving our great nation in Desert Storm.
Augustine: Man, I love the way you talk... using 40 words where four will do. I'm curious. What would you say if I was about to put 40 bullets through that beautiful vest of yours?
Crowder: "What're you waiting for?"
Augustine: Oh, you're cool, huh?
Crowder: I tried to keep it to four words. You'll allow the contraction as one.”

Goggins’ genius as an actor is to bring complexity to characters that might otherwise be dismissed as simple. Crowder is cool, calm, collected – every bit the equal of the Big City gangster or anyone else he confronts. In that same story arc, he effectively summarized the character he created when he told the Detroit boys: “You figured you'd drive south anyway, rip off the simple people? Well, we ain't that simple."

Goggins best showed his acting chops on a cameo for another FX drama, “Sons of Anarchy,” about a biker gang that plays a central role – for good and ill – in a small California community. Goggins played Venus Van Dam, a transgender escort who periodically crosses paths with the Sons of Anarchy gang.

 

'Venus Van Dam'

Venus Van Dam looked so cartoonish, it would be so easy to play her with over-the-top flamboyance. But Goggins gave her dignity, effectively revealing the lifetime of pain that had brought Venus to that point and demonstrating an intelligent, sensitive person swept up in a Southern Gothic storm.

Venus described her prostitute mother as a “street performer” who was unable to “raise a boy of questionable orientation” whose “inclinations” at an early age set a “gender direction” that Mama tried to cure through making her participate in child pornography. Another time she described her mother as similarly built as Venus “but gravity has not been her friend.”

Kurt Sutter – the genius behind “Sons of Anarchy” and a participant in what I consider to be some of the best television dramas ever made (including “The Shield”) – outlined the character and her role in the story. But he turned Goggins loose to flesh out Venus, and much of her dialogue was improvised.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Goggins said being a transgender character was his idea. His goal was to be respectful to transgender people by making her “a three-dimensional person with feelings. Sassy, sweet, smart, and beautiful. Try to make her as beautiful as I can be — it takes a lot of work for me as a straight man much less as a woman to be anything close to beautiful. … If you spend enough time thinking about it, and you’re coming from a real pure place in your heart and you give yourself over to making believe, then all of those specific kinds of moments just become second nature and they just happen.”

“They just happen.” Only for great actors like Goggins.

The character’s name, longtime Goggins and FX fans will know, was a nod to Goggins’ character on “The Shield,” Shane Vendrell, a loyal but ambitious crooked cop. Vendrell occasionally used Cletus Van Damme as a fake name (such as renting a storage unit to hide stolen money). Apparently Goggins – and Vendrell – are big fans of action-movie hero Jean Claude Van Damme.

Walton Sanders Goggins Jr. was born in Birmingham on Nov. 10, 1971, but grew up in Georgia, west of Atlanta. He has lived in Los Angeles since 1990, when he made his film debut in the movie “Murder in Mississippi.” He also has worked on the both sides of the camera for more than a decade as a producer, and has played role in recent blockbusters “Django Unchained” and “Lincoln.”

An avid traveler and photographer, Goggins also has been involved in political, educational and environmental cause, according to various online biographies.

As it turns out, Boyd Crowder’s character was supposed to die at the end of the Season 1 of “Justified,” according to another interview Goggins gave Entertainment Weekly. But the producers realized that Crowder – as played by Goggins – was essential to the ongoing success of the fledgling show.

They were right. Elmore Leonard created the characters of lawman Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder, but killed Crowder off at the end of his novel “Fire in the Hole,” which inspired the show “Justified.” Leonard liked Goggins’ portrayal so much, the novelist resurrected Boyd Crowder as a character in a follow-up novel, “Raylan,” released three years before Leonard’s death last fall.

Only one more season of “Justified” remains before the show ends production. But I know I’m not done enjoying Walton Goggins. I can’t wait to see who he comes up with next.