Anyone who is even slightly active on social media has most likely seen a specific screengrab of Walton Goggins on their timeline over and over again in the last 24 hours, with the 53-year-old actor one of the stars of the current season of The White Lotus. Walton plays Rick on the show, and in this week’s episode, Rick met up with his old friend Frank in Bangkok.
You can read the monologue in full below, but the TL;DR is that Rick unassumingly asks Frank how he has been as they’ve not seen each other for a while, prompting Frank to go into a whole speech about the spiritual journey he has been on after becoming addicted to sex and realizing that he wants to be a Thai woman who men like him have sex with.
Frank speaks almost completely uninterrupted for nearly a full five minutes, and Walton delivers an absolute masterclass in reactive acting as Rick, who attentively listens to the undeniably bizarre things that his friend is saying seemingly without any judgment. While he is visibly shocked and confused by Frank’s comments, he occasionally offers murmurs of encouragement and reassurance, and when Frank finishes, he simply says: “Yeah.”
And it’s arguably unsurprising that this moment has gone as viral as it has, with social media users having an absolute field day with Rick’s reaction shots. Sharing a screengrab of him, one person tweeted: “if I send you this, it means I’m listening but I’m going to need a second to process this.”
Discussing his performance with Vanity Fair after the episode aired, Walton explained: “The only thing that I can say is that I had no judgment. It took me a moment to wrap my head around this particular life experience, so it was like: ‘Wow, wow, okay.’ But without judgment — I think that’s what’s so beautiful about it.”
You can read Frank’s monologue in full below, and also watch the clip.
Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments!