Fallout Star Walton Goggins' Best Performance Is Still In This Modern Western Series

Walton Goggins has built a prolific acting career, and we're all richer for it. I first noticed him in the Quentin Tarantino films "Django Unchained" and "The Hateful Eight," and the latter (where he plays Chris Mannix, who's as endearing as an ex-Confederate soldier can be) is where I noticed what a talent he was.

It's difficult to choose the best Walton Goggins roles, from "The Righteous Gemstones" to "The White Lotus" to his recent turn as the Ghoul on "Fallout." But if you truly have to pick one role over the others, it's his portrayal of Boyd Crowder on FX Neo-Western "Justified."

"Justified" follows the character of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, written by Elmore Leonard and portrayed for TV by Timothy Olyphant. Though "Justified" is set in the modern day, and Kentucky isn't in the geographic West, Raylan styles himself like a Wild West sheriff — with a cowboy hat and a shoot-first policy.

The TV series is based specifically on the third Raylan story, the 2001 novella "Fire in the Hole." Raylan goes home to Harlan County, Kentucky and encounters his old coal mining pal Boyd, now a reactionary militia leader. "Justified" uses "Fire in the Hole" as the story of its pilot episode, then spins out into original tales.

The novella climaxes with Raylan killing Boyd, which was meant to be how the "Justified" pilot would end, too. But Goggins' Boyd was too good to kill off, so he became the co-lead of "Justified." The series is just as much his story as Raylan's, and it explores how two men can be enemies yet still share a mutual understanding; as Raylan and Boyd put it, they dug coal together.

"Justified" ran for six seasons, and it never stopped being fun to watch Goggins play Boyd.

Before "Justified," Walton Goggins starred on another FX show, "The Shield," which was about a corrupt anti-gang task force in the Los Angeles Police Department. Goggins played Shane Vendrell, right hand of the team's leader Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis). Shane is a racist, hotheaded screw-up who constantly creates problems for himself and his team. He's careless, but even when he thinks his decisions through, he almost always makes the wrong choice. Shane's trip-ups don't make him comic relief, either, but often only more desperate and detestable.

Since "The Shield" and "Justified" aired on the same network, and Boyd and Shane have some surface similarities, I'd assumed Goggins' performance as Boyd would be resemble how he played Shane. But when I actually watched "Justified," I marveled at how different he played them.

Shane thinks he's as smart as Boyd actually is. Grandiloquent and silver tongued, Boyd never uses one word when he can use a dozen instead, and it is bliss hearing Goggins spin poetry out of Boyd's verbosity. Raylan has a wit to match Boyd, too, but he's more laconic and not nearly as oily. It wouldn't be honest to say Boyd gets all of the best lines on "Justified," but he sure gets most of them. As Boyd himself states: "I've been accused of being a lot of things. Inarticulate ain't one of them."

That's not to say he's all talk, though. During a tense negotiation in the episode "The Toll," Boyd tosses the aggressive Ethan Picker (John Kapelos) a pack of cigarettes to calm his nerves. Picker admonishes Boyd that "sh*t'll kill you." Cue a ticker bomb in the pack exploding. It's one of the best Boyd Crowder moments and a rare TV scene that made my jaw truly drop.

It's easy to call Boyd Crowder a snake, and just as that slithering beast sheds its skin, Boyd goes through some character shifts across "Justified" — sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Boyd knows how to use big words and he knows how to "blow sh*t up," but beyond that, he isn't sure of who he is.

When we first meet him, he's a white supremacist gang leader with tattoos to show for it; he spouts "fire in the hole!" when he fires a rocket launcher at a Black church. (Goggins found Boyd's early racism difficult to play.) After Raylan shoots him, Boyd takes a new lease on life and becomes a man of God, trying to turn his back on crime and create a born-again community. When that fails, he returns to an honest job of coal mining in season 2, but is dragged back into crime. 

He spends the rest of the series as a gangster once more; no one can forget his past, so he'll use it to get ahead. But as Boyd spends the latter half of "Justified" learning, becoming a big fish might be beyond his grasp. Even so, his attempts give him new conviction in himself as an outlaw.

In the penultimate "Justified" episode, "Collateral," Boyd carjacks a man named Hagan (Shea Whigham). Sitting in his car, Boyd says finally: "I know who I am [...] I'm an outlaw," just before he fires his gun into Hagan's head. Goggins, excellent as ever, strips away the charisma from Boyd to go cold and terrifying as "Justified" gives us the cruelest glimpse of who an outlaw like Boyd Crowder is.