After nine episodes, one incest storyline and a near-death experience involving a smoothie maker, The White Lotus season three has finally wrapped up.
One of the finale’s biggest moments was the fate of the star-crossed lovers, Chelsea and Rick (Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins). Fresh from his encounter with Jim Hollinger in the previous episode, Rick returns to The White Lotus hotel at the start of the finale and tells Chelsea he’s got the “monkey off my back.” He’s made his peace with his past, or so he thinks.
Sadly, that all goes tragically wrong when Hollinger reappears — leading to a shoot-out in which Rick kills both him and (in the crossfire) Chelsea. Their story wraps up with Rick himself being shot by Gaitok.
It’s a deeply sad ending to the pair’s journey — as well as one that has unexpected parallels with Goggins’ own life. The actor travelled around Thailand after his first wife, Leanne Goggins, took her life by suicide. They were separated by the time of her death.
“I went to Thailand 18 years ago after a trauma in my life, looking for peace, looking for some resolution that was not so dissimilar from what Rick was looking for,” Goggins told Vulture about the finale.
“The circumstances were dramatically different. I was a year into a relationship with my now-wife [Nadia Conners], and I was as lost as Rick is lost. I had nothing for my partner. I understood, intimately, Rick’s frame of mind. I read it on the page and I thought, ‘The universe brought this to me for a reason, because I understand him, and I love him, and I love people like him. I don’t think he’s alone in the world.’”
In the interview, Goggins also talked about the impact his spirituality had in allowing him to move on and “fall in love with myself”.
“It’s something I applied to Rick,” he added. “I think most of us start off not having the tools to love ourselves, not having the space to even contemplate what that really means. Some people are never able to transcend in that way and love themselves.”
For himself, he says, he found it. “I searched for three years and didn’t have an option to go forward as the person I was before this moment in my own life. It was like, ‘This is it. Just forgive yourself. Forgive your circumstances. Forgive the people that fucking were doing their best, and just be okay with it. You don’t have to be anything other than what you are, and you’re enough, man. If you can love you, then you can love anybody.’ Those were lessons I learned 15 years before this experience, and they were hard-won. Reading the scripts, I felt like this guy will realize it too late.”
The White Lotus season three is streaming on NOW
