The strange keepsake Walton Goggins kept from ‘The Hateful Eight’: “That would look so good on a sofa”
Over the past 25 years, Walton Goggins has carefully curated one of the greatest filmographies of our time. On television, he grew his star thanks to defining performances in The Shield and Justified before he lent his talents to eye-catching supporting turns in movies like Lincoln, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight before returning to TV to finally break out as a star in Fallout and The White Lotus. Goggins considers his two-movie stint with Quentin Tarantino pivotal in his road to stardom, though.
That’s perhaps why he kept an unusual keepsake from his second movie with the iconic director – a keepsake he later gifted to an equally iconic late-night host.
Despite being one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation and a true cult icon to people in the know, Goggins will be the first to admit that starring in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight put him on the Hollywood map in a whole new way. Tarantino first spotted him in Justified, the Timothy Olyphant-starring neo-western based on a character created by the legendary crime writer Elmore Leonard, whose writing hugely influenced Tarantino. In fact, he based Jackie Brown on Leonard’s novel Rum Punch. So, when Tarantino saw Goggins excelling with Leonard’s dialogue on Justified, he knew they were a match made in heaven.
“I can look back on my working life and look at this break or that break,” Goggins told The Irish Times in 2018. “But the most definite shift in my working life was before Quentin Tarantino and after Quentin Tarantino. I’m very grateful he saw something in me. It was a gift to help him realise the images he had in his brain.”
Goggins has always been open about how life-changing The Hateful Eight experience was for him. In 2024, he revealed to Conan O’Brien that he is regularly in contact with many of his co-stars from that film. In fact, they have a WhatsApp group that is still active nine years after it was created. Of course, O’Brien also owns a much more tangible piece of Goggins’ experience on the movie than a text chain – a keepsake from the set he gave to the iconic host as a gift.
During an August 2024 episode of Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, the host took a walk down memory lane. He remembered he and his wife packing up his office on the Warner Brothers lot in 2021 after his ten-year stint presenting Conan. When they combed through a storage facility to decide what to keep and what to get rid of, though, he came across something his wife assumed was a “furry dead animal.” In a way, she was right – it was actually an animal pelt that hung on the wall of Minnie’s Haberdashery in Tarantino’s violent western mystery.
It turned out that Goggins had bought the pelt from the studio after the production wrapped, admitting that he and his wife had been “coveting all these animal skins for like six months.” He jokingly remembered thinking, “Whoa, that’s just a pretty brown one right there. That would look so good on a sofa. Conan will love this one!”
Ultimately, Goggins gave the pelt to O’Brien backstage after an appearance on his show because he knew the host was a massive Tarantino fan. Unfortunately, O’Brien’s wife wasn’t as enthused about it, and she yelled, “What the hell is this? We’re getting rid of it!” to which O’Brien amusingly bellowed, “We are not getting rid of it! Walton Goggins gave that to me!”
In all sincerity, O’Brien told Goggins that the gift did mean a lot to him, as he loved the movie and Goggins’ performance in it. Naturally, though, he then quipped, “It really does look like a squirrel that got run over by a truck. That’s what it looks like, more than anything else, which might be what it is.”
