(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 29 November 2025 15:45, UK
At long last, Walton Goggins has graduated from being ‘that guy from that thing you’ve seen’ to becoming a star in his own right, and it’s only taken him the better part of 40 years to get there.
He made his screen debut all the way back in a 1989 episode of the police procedural In the Heat of the Night, and it would still be another decade and change before he landed his breakthrough role as Shane Vendrell in The Shield, one of the shows that helped usher in the current ‘Golden Age’ of television.
One of the lesser-known things about Goggins is that he’s technically been an Academy Award winner since 2002. The previous year, he produced and starred in The Accountant, a 40-minute black comedy that won the Oscar for ‘Best Live Action Short Film’, which is where the technicality comes in.
Since there’s only room on the ballot for two names, he graciously allowed writer, director, and co-star Ray McKinnon and his wife and executive producer, Lisa Blount, to take the honours. Since they didn’t need two Oscars in their marital home, though, they gave the other one to Goggins for his contributions.
At the time, he was playing minor parts in things like Jackie Chan’s Shanghai Noon, horror sequel The Crow: Salvation, and a Murder, She Wrote TV movie. That’s where his career was at the time, and that’s how things had been since it began, which meant there are certain performances he doesn’t look back on too fondly.
One of them came in 1992, when he played Mike Muchin in a solitary episode of Beverly Hills 90210. It was one of the biggest and most-watched shows on TV at the time, but when The AV Club dragged it up from obscurity to press Goggins for his thoughts and recollections, he’d rather they hadn’t bothered.
“Buddy, don’t even try to picture that,” he said. “Don’t put that in your imagination. I would not want to subject you to that. Mike Muchin was his name. He was in one or two scenes, and he was at a party with Tori Spelling.” When asked if he remembered anything about it, he almost drew a blank: “I barked like a seal.”
“The biggest show, I think, in the universe,” he added of 90210‘s cache. “Everyone had sideburns two weeks after that show came out. To work with those guys and to meet them in person, it was a pop culture experience unlike any I’d ever had at the time.” He appreciated being a young actor guest-starring in a ratings sensation, but he’d rather you didn’t track down the footage for yourself.
Unfortunately for him, in the age of high-speed internet and streaming, it’s not difficult to find. Most people know Goggins from The Shield, Justified, his Quentin Tarantino collaborations, The White Lotus, The Righteous Gemstones, Fallout, or Vice Principals, but there might even be some obsessive 90210 superfan somewhere who recognises him best as that guy who popped up in the second season’s 24th episode.
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