“Justified” star Walton Goggins likes it when you come up and pester him on the street. No, really.
“It’s wonderful, because I’m at a place where I get to interface with people that dig what I do, and I get to have real intimate conversations with them on the street,” said the actor, stopping to chat with me at this month’s San Diego Comic-Con. “When people wanna talk, [and] they have something to say, I feel – especially having been on television for ten years – you are asking someone to take out an hour of [their] week to spend with you over the course of our show. That’s 13 hours a year. That’s a lot of time! They have the right to come up to you and tell you how they feel about it.”
Of course, the real reason Goggins was speaking with me was to promote his role in the upcoming Quentin Tarantino film “Django Unchained” (“it’s unapologetically ruthless and horrible, but funny,” he told me), which stars Jamie Foxx as a freed slave who sets out to rescue his wife from the clutches of sadistic plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Goggins, for his part, plays Billy Crash, one of Candie’s cold-blooded employees.
“He’s Calvin Candie’s Mandingo fight trainer extraordinaire,” he said, referring to the slave fights that are put on for Candie’s amusement (a plot element set up in the film’s trailer). “And he’s as ruthless as they come, and doesn’t move a whole lot, because it’s real humid in Mississippi.”
Also covered during our brief chat: what it was like to audition for Tarantino, the necessity of being “cool” on set and the evolution of Goggins’ celebrity over the years. Click on the video above for the full interview!
“Django Unchained” hits theaters on December 25.
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