TVSquad Talks To Walton Goggins on "The Shield" Series Finale

[JamesG]

Walton Goggins Talks About "The Shield" Series Finale
by Kim Potts
posted Jun 8th 2010


Goggins called TV Squad from Los Angeles to talk about how he felt about the way the storyline wrapped for his other complex TV alter ego, Shane Vendrell.





This ("Justified") certainly isn't the first time you're playing such a complicated character ...

Shane Vendrell, on "The Shield", was an incredible character, one that really took viewers on a rollercoaster from hating him to empathizing with him to liking him and then, in that series finale, just being crushed by how his story ended.

What was your reaction to Shane's storyline in the series finale, how he and his family were painted into this tragic corner, after all those years of investing so much in the character?

Thank you for saying that.

Initially, when I read the script, I was alone in Italy, of all places, doing this movie for Spike Lee [Miracle at St. Anna], and the script had been sent to me on location, and upon reading it the first time, I threw it down, and just started crying and screaming, to be quite honest with you, and said, "There's no way I'm gonna do this. There's no way this character can recover from that decision."


And I felt like I had had to overcome quite a few things to get the audience to sympathize and to care for Shane, from saying the N-word to killing, arguably, one of the most-loved characters on the show in Lem to a number of the things that Shane had done, and I thought that making that decision for his family was something he can never recover from.




But then I read it again, and realized the genius of ["The Shield" creator] Shawn Ryan and the rest of the writers on the show, and the opportunity that I had been given, which was to, if we did this with love, if I was able to infuse this with love, and not coming from a self-centered point-of-view, then maybe I can get the audience to be moved in a way that they may not have expected, and to make, in some ways, Shane the ultimate martyr, and his family the ultimate martyrs, for everything they had engaged in over the course of these seven seasons.

That it was, maybe a great morality tale ... that karma is a motherf***er, and you will eventually reap what you sow.











And did you feel it played out that way?

You know, I did not know for a year. It was a year between the filming of the last episode, and when it aired, almost to the day.


And so, I felt it on the day. I felt like we'd done something really special, not just with Shane's storyline, but with all the characters ... But it was only when I was sitting in an audience with 400 people watching a live feed of the finale episode, and I knew the scene with Shane was coming up, and my heart was in my throat.

I just thought, "Oh, here we go. Either they're gonna hate him or they're going to love him ... I'll know in about 45 seconds." And then the shot went off, and Shane made the decision to end his life, and it was completely quiet. You could hear a pin drop, with 400 people.


And then the only thing you could hear afterwards was sobs, people crying. And I turned to my fiancée and I said, "We got 'em. We got 'em. I can't believe it worked!"

http://www.tvsquad.com/2010/06/08/wa...-finale-the-s/