The White Lotus Season 3 Scene That Sent Walton Goggins To The Hospital

Do not attend the snake show if you haven’t watched “The White Lotus” season 3, episode 3, “The Meaning of Dreams” — spoilers lie ahead.

In the third episode of the third season of Mike White’s (supposed) anthology series about rich people behaving badly, “The White Lotus,” the wealthy and cantankerous Rick (Walton Goggins) decides to leave the beautiful resort in Thailand behind for a day with his much-younger girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and, on a whim, decides the couple should attend a local snake show. Unfortunately for everybody but especially Chelsea, Rick bought marijuana from a dispensary nearby before going to the show, and it’s clearly very strong … strong enough to make him believe that all the snakes should be freed. When Rick starts opening all of the on-site terrariums to release the reptiles, Chelsea confronts him only to be bitten by one, at which point she’s rushed to the hospital. Incredibly, Goggins told Jimmy Kimmel on the host’s eponymous show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” that he got bitten in real life while filming this sequence.

To start, Goggins is afraid of snakes, so that’s bad right off the bat. “I don’t just have a phobia, it’s like a missing link when it comes to snakes,” Goggins explained. “I am terrified of snakes — really, really terrified — and there’s something, like, genetically wrong with me when it comes to snakes.”

So Goggins had to grab a bunch of snakes for the scene, which isn’t great … and beforehand, an animal wrangler told him which ones were particularly dangerous and poisonous. “All I’m thinking about is the very first cage where the snake will kill you — ‘don’t open that’ — and then the rest of it just goes out of my mind,” Goggins told Kimmel. “And then they yelled action, and it’s like, ‘Okay, don’t open the first one because it’ll kill you.’ The next one, ‘Was it green or was it brown? Which one has a big, big bite?'” That’s when Goggins needed to pull a green snake from its enclosure, who didn’t much like being manhandled: “As I was pulling the snake out, he didn’t wanna come, right?” he recalled. “And so he turns around and he bit me.”

Walton Goggins is, by my estimation, a pretty cool guy, and he usually plays relatively cool guys (with the obvious exception of, like, Baby Billy Freeman on “The Righteous Gemstones,” another HBO series). As he told Jimmy Kimmel, he did not take this on-set injury in stride. “I wish I could’ve been cool — like I fancy myself a pretty cool guy,” Goggins said. “Like, ‘Hey, yeah, I got a snakebite.’ This was my reaction: I swear to God, it was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been bit by a snake! Oh my God!'”

After panicking for a while — which is pretty understandable, all things considered — Goggins calmed down, only to get a call from the show’s producers telling him that they wanted him to seek immediate medical attention, which made him panic all over again. “I finally got it out of my system — it’s like, ‘You’re okay,'” Goggins continued. “I get a phone call from the producer saying, ‘Hey, you know what? We’ve been thinking about it and we’re thinking maybe you should go to the hospital.’ I said, ‘For what? You said the snake was nonvenomous, right? Am I dying a slow death? Is there something you know I don’t know?'”

“So I did go to the hospital, and I got a shot,” Walton Goggins told Kimmel (who quipped, “So, in other words, they got a call from the lawyers at HBO”). Kimmel was joking for the benefit of his audience, but according to Goggins, the joke was more correct than the late night host intended. “That’s exactly what happened. And they made me sign that day!” Goggins exclaimed. “Somebody just kinda came up — ‘I’m sorry you’re not feeling too good. Listen, can you just sign this little bitty piece of paper?’ I thought, ‘You want my autograph, or I’ve just lost all of my rights?'”

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Goggins made it quite clear, yet again, that he really doesn’t like snakes … and filming the experience was just incredibly harrowing. “It was a nightmare for me — really, genuinely,” he told the outlet. “It was two days of like, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ and they had somebody right off camera, as soon as I would pick a snake up, I’d bring it over and put it in their arms like, ‘Oh my God,’ and almost f***ing pass out every time.” In that same interview, Aimee Lou Wood also talked to the outlet, but apparently, she doesn’t share Goggins’ fears: “It was so fun! I’m not afraid of snakes at all. Walton is, however — it’s his biggest fear, and he’s had to, now twice in his career, interact with snakes on quite a high-key level. So I was doing a lot of moral support for him.”

“The White Lotus” airs new episodes every Sunday on HBO and Max at 9 P.M. EST.