For Anyone Who’s Not Watching “The White Lotus,” Here’s A Full Breakdown Of That Viral Walton Goggins Meme — And You’re Probably Not Prepared For What You’re About To Read

Anyone who is even slightly active on social media has most likely seen a specific screengrab of Walton Goggins on their timeline over and over again in the last 24 hours, with the 53-year-old actor one of the stars of the current season of The White Lotus. Walton plays Rick on the show, and in this week’s episode, Rick met up with his old friend Frank in Bangkok.

HBO Oscar-winning actor Sam Rockwell took on the role of Frank, and it was his monologue that spawned the Walton reaction pic that has now taken on a life of its own.

You can read the monologue in full below, but the TL;DR is that Rick unassumingly asks Frank how he has been as they’ve not seen each other for a while, prompting Frank to go into a whole speech about the spiritual journey he has been on after becoming addicted to sex and realizing that he wants to be a Thai woman who men like him have sex with.

HBO Yes, you read that correctly, one direct quote from the monologue is: “I got in my head what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting fucked by me.”

Frank speaks almost completely uninterrupted for nearly a full five minutes, and Walton delivers an absolute masterclass in reactive acting as Rick, who attentively listens to the undeniably bizarre things that his friend is saying seemingly without any judgment. While he is visibly shocked and confused by Frank’s comments, he occasionally offers murmurs of encouragement and reassurance, and when Frank finishes, he simply says: “Yeah.”

HBO

And it’s arguably unsurprising that this moment has gone as viral as it has, with social media users having an absolute field day with Rick’s reaction shots. Sharing a screengrab of him, one person tweeted: “if I send you this, it means I’m listening but I’m going to need a second to process this.”

HBO “He couldn’t believe what he was hearing but stayed supportive. Find yourself a friend like Rick,” somebody else wrote.

One more said of one of Rick’s brief responses to Frank: “The best delivery of ‘mmhmm’ in the history of television.”

“Rick’s facial expressions have me CRYING,” one more wrote alongside four different screengrabs of Rick from the scene.

Somebody else joked that everyone felt the same way that Rick did watching the scene, sharing a gif of him and quipping: “Everyone during that monologue.”

Discussing his performance with Vanity Fair after the episode aired, Walton explained: “The only thing that I can say is that I had no judgment. It took me a moment to wrap my head around this particular life experience, so it was like: ‘Wow, wow, okay.’ But without judgment — I think that’s what’s so beautiful about it.”

Jamie McCarthy / WireImage He added that his interaction with Frank was an opportunity to show Rick in a different light, sharing: “Here’s a person who you think judges fucking everyone at The White Lotus, but when he connects, there is no judgment and there’s just listening.”

You can read Frank’s monologue in full below, and also watch the clip.

HBO Frank: “I moved here because, well, I had to leave the States, but I picked Thailand because I always had a thing for Asian girls, you know? And when I got here, oh I was like kid in a candy store. If you’ve got money, no attachments, nothing to do… I started partying, it got wild.

“I was picking up girls every night, always different ones; petite ones, chubby ones, older ones, sometimes multiple ladies at night. I was out of control, I became insatiable, and, you know, after about a thousand nights like that, you start to lose it. I started to wonder: Where am I going with this? Why do I feel this need to fuck all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me? Because she’s the opposite of me? Is she gonna complete me in some way? I realized I could fuck a million women, I’d still never be satisfied — maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.”

After Rick asks if he really means what he is saying, Frank affirms: “Really,” before continuing: “So, one night, I took home some girl who turned out to be a ladyboy, which I’d done before, but this time, instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me, and It was kind of magical. And I got in my head, what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting fucked by me, and to feel that.

“So, I put out an ad looking for a white guy my age to come over and fuck me, got a guy that looked a lot like me. Then, I put on some lingerie and perfume, made myself look like one of these girls — I thought: I look pretty hot. And then this guy came over and railed the shit out of me, then I got addiced to that — some nights, three, four guys would come over and rail the shit out of me. Some I even had to pay, and at the same time, I’d hire an Asian girl who’d just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy is fucking me, and I’d think: ‘I am her and I’m fucking me.’”

“Hey, we all have our Achilles heel, man, you know?” Frank goes on. “Where does it come from? Why are some of us attracted to the opposite form and some of us the same? Sex is a poetic act, it’s a metaphor; a metaphor for what? Are we are our forms? Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl? …I guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer, then I realized, I gotta stop the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl. I got into Buddhism, which is all about spirit versus form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending Carousel of lust and suffering. Being sober isn’t so hard, being celibate though, it’s… I still miss that buzzing, man.”