Bisexuality is a funny thing. While my crushes on female celebrities feel, to me, fairly predictable—Rachel Griffiths as Brenda Chenoweth on Six Feet Under, Rosemarie DeWitt as Midge on Mad Men, Parker Posey quite literally all of the time, and other mean brunettes of that nature—my crushes on famous men are, well…inexplicable, to put it honestly.
I may have grown out of my softboy stage, Baruch Hashem, but lately, I’ve noticed that my unattainable famous-guy crushes lean somewhat toward the…sad, from a lovelorn Albert Brooks in Broadcast News to James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano.
Given that context, maybe it’s not so surprising that the latest TV character to capture my heart almost against my will is none other than a long-haired, gray-stubbled, open-Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Walton Goggins as disillusioned Thailand tourist Rick Hatchett on season 3 of The White Lotus.
Obviously, it’s not that crazy to lust after Goggins, given he is a handsome Hollywood actor who somehow makes having the name of a nonagenarian British detective attractive, but…Rick? Really? Is this my taste in men now? (I should note that my actual boyfriend is in no way a creep with massive sex-tourist vibes.) Honestly, Goggins’s White Lotus character may be embodying nothing so much as the many, many sunburned, depressed white guys I narrowly avoided having many drawn-out conversations over beachside-bar martinis with on my trip to Bali last summer. (In fact, this trope was even referenced during the show’s season premiere, with a new friend of Rick’s incongruously sweet and sunny girlfriend Chelsea warning her, “You’ll notice a lot of bald white guys in Thailand. The locals call them LBHs: Losers Back Home.”) But there’s still something about his dour yet perfectly tanned countenance that I’m finding undeniably sexy.
Of course, schmuck style is nothing new—please see Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems for more—but there’s something weirdly compelling about a guy who’s rich enough to take you on vacation yet tortured enough to not actually want to be on said vacation with you.
Would I put up with this for a second in real life? Absolutely not—I’m way too anxiously attached for that nonsense!—but given that The White Lotus is 100% pure, uncut fantasy, I’m allowing myself to indulge in the dream of drinking a mai tai somewhere in the general vicinity of Walton Goggins while he repeatedly runs his hands through his thinning hair over worries he’s too vaguely misogynistic to unburden himself to me about. The heart wants what it wants, okay?
