'A Horror Show': Walton Goggins Reveals How The White Lotus' Snake Show Scene Impacted His Real-Life Phobia, And I'm Sweating Just Thinking About It

Spoilers below for the latest episode of The White Lotus for anyone who hasn’t yet watched on HBO or streamed it with a Max subscription, so be warned!

With its third Season 3 outing, The White Lotus already started setting the stage for Jon Gries’ shady AF Greg/Gary to redirect his focus to endangering the life of Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, and I can’t imagine the impending yacht trip with the Ratliff family will be an encouraging preface for it. But the most baffling sequence in the episode belonged to Walton Goggins’ timebomb Rick.

At this point, viewers aren’t yet fully aware of why Rick is at this White Lotus location, considering he’s either listlessly angry or lethargic, but he’s targeting the absentee husband of resort owner Sritala, and is also apparently dealing with the long-gestating trauma of his father’s murder. So we’re already worried about Goggins’ Rick, and such worries exploded after one of the most nerve-rattling scenes of any 2025 TV show so far, which apparently dovetailed with the actor’s real-life fears.

Speaking with EW, the Fallout co-star didn’t mince words when addressing his innate discomfort when filming the snake show sequence that not only had him watching other actors physically handle the reptiles, but also holding a pretty massive one himself after letting the majority of them free. Here’s how Goggins felt about it:

Here here for snake liberation! But not so much for lacing prerolled joints at local dispensaries, assuming that was indeed a root cause for Rick falling backwards into the Twilight Zone for a few minutes. I can't imagine that untainted marijuana would make anyone sweat buckets the way Rick does.

In any case, I'm now unclear on how much of that sequence's effectiveness was due to Walton Goggins' legitimate nervousness, and how much can be put on him just being a solid actor through and through. I think it would absolutely come down to how much of his facial sweat was real, and how much was applied before each shot. Because both the actor and character looked as genuinely miserable as could be.

On the flip side, Aimee Lou Wood shared none of her co-star's ill feelings about filming the snake show scene, but wasn't entirely unsympathetic to his woes. As she put it:

That's a classy move for both the actress and her character Chelsea, who wound up being bitten by one of the many reptiles that Rick let loose. She survived, and doesn't seem to have any lasting effects from the incident, but time will tell whether it'll come back to haunt her.

When it comes to narrative thematics and foreshadowing, Walton Goggins talked about how the snake show chaos is representative Rick's own inner turmoil and how he views his current situation. As he put it:

That answer can provide as much or as little insight into Rick's situation as one wishes to seek out. Is the man he's tracking down responsible for putting Rick on a downward spiral, perhaps in connection with his father's death? Or is someone else the "writer" here, and Sritala's husband is just a middleman of sorts?

I know I'll be watching future episodes as intently as can be, and as far away from any poisonous snakes as can be, when HBO debuts new The White Lotus episodes every Sunday night at 8:00 p.m.