Walton Goggins and Kaitlyn Dever Are Out for Revenge

Kaitlyn Dever starts off her Reunited conversation with former Justified costar Walton Goggins by asking a uncomplicated question: Does he really walk around his property nude, as she read in some interviews?

“As a matter of fact, I do,” says Goggins with a wide smile on his face. Goggins adds that his home in the Hudson Valley, which sits on more than 100 acres, is quite isolated. It’s just him, his wife, his 14-year-old son, and their black Lab.

Right now a clothed Goggins is enjoying some long-awaited downtime after a busy shooting and promotional schedule. One of the projects that took him far from home for so long was the third season of HBO’s The White Lotus, in which he played Rick, a man who travels all the way to Thailand to avenge the death of his father.

Dever also recently played a character out for revenge—and similarly driven by the death of her father. She joined The Last of Us in season two as Abby Anderson, who violently kills Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal)—the man who killed her own father, a surgeon hoping to create a cure for the infection turning wide swaths of the population into fungi-fueled zombies.

Dever and Goggins had to go to very shadowy places for these projects, both of which ended up melding the personal and professional for them: Goggins shot The White Lotus in Thailand, a place he’d visited nearly two decades earlier on his own personal journey of discovery and healing. Dever had to shoot The Last of Us’s violent death scene only weeks after her mother passed away.

They’re both fully committed to their work. “You can’t control what other people’s response is, but you have total control about your commitment to playing pretend,” says Goggins. “And so to not feel it, to not unearth every fucking ounce of that pain—you’re not doing a disservice to the audience, you’re doing a disservice to yourself.”

They met back when a 14-year-old Dever joined Justified for its second season to play Loretta McCready—her first major role. Goggins starred on the FX series as career criminal Boyd Crowder; the part earned him an Emmy nomination and helped launch his prolific career to fresh heights.

The pair, who also worked together on the 2019 movie Them That Follow, reflect on how Justified changed their careers, the ways they’ve dealt with fear on set, and what they’ve learned from playing characters driven by revenge.

Vanity Fair: What do you remember about meeting on Justified?

Kaitlyn Dever: We were shooting a scene at Margo Martindale’s character’s house. She had a get-together. I think that’s the first time I met you. It was very brief. Because I was like 14, I have these memories—I think the memories that you keep as a child are very sparkly memories, and they stand out as such essential moments. I just remember literally looking up at you guys always talking to the directors and having these really essential conversations about dialogue and character and structure. And I was like, Whoa, I don’t do this. Maybe I should be doing this.

Walton Goggins: I met you before I met you. And what I mean by that is I had several conversations, initiated first and foremost by Timothy [Olyphant] and then by Graham Yost, the showrunner of Justified. And both of them kept talking about this newborn actor that we had gotten for season two. They just went on and on about how special this person was. I remember thinking to myself, I’ll be the judge of that. And then I saw Kaitlyn work for the very first time, and I remember thinking to myself, Wow, okay, how aged is she? Fourteen years aged. Okay, this person is going to have a significant impact on this business if she decides to stay in it for a while. And I was right.