Walton Goggins reveals he was bitten by snake on ‘The White Lotus’ set

Walton Goggins confronted one of his biggest fears while filming the latest episode of The White Lotus — and all he got was a nasty bite. 

The actor, who plays the grumpy Rick on Mike White‘s Emmy-winning series, has revealed that he went to the hospital after being bitten by a snake while shooting a scene in which his character has a drug-fueled meltdown at a snake show and starts opening their cages.

“I don’t just have a phobia – it’s like a missing link when it comes to snakes,” Goggins told host Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live. “I am terrified of snakes — really, really terrified — and there’s something, like, genetically wrong with me when it comes to snakes.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Goggins explained that before filming the handler walked him past all of the snakes’ cages and told him which of them were venomous. “All I’m thinking about is the very first cage where the snake will kill you — ‘don’t open that’ — and then the rest of it just goes out of my mind,” he said. “And then they yelled action, and it’s like, ‘Okay, don’t open the first one because it’ll kill you.’ The next one, ‘Was it green or was it brown? Which one has a big, big bite?'”

In his panic, Goggins attempted to pull out a green snake that very much did not appreciate a random man tugging on its tail. “As I was pulling the snake out, he didn’t wanna come, right?” he recalled. “And so he turns around and he bit me.”

This prompted Kimmel to reply, “Oh no! Oh wow!”

Goggins did not, uh, handle it well. “I wish I could’ve been cool — like I fancy myself a pretty cool guy. Like, ‘Hey, yeah, I got a snakebite,'” he recalled. “This was my reaction: I swear to God, it was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been bit by a snake! Oh my God!'”

He said the show’s team took care of the injury by putting “a little Neosporin” on it before finishing the rest of their nine-hour shoot, but added that a producer informed him the next day that he should probably get the bite checked out at a local hospital. 

“I finally got it out of my system — it’s like, ‘You’re okay.’ I get a phone call from the producer saying, ‘Hey, you know what? We’ve been thinking about it and we’re thinking maybe you should go to the hospital,'” Goggins recalled. “I said, ‘For what? You said the snake was nonvenomous, right? Am I dying a slow death? Is there something you know I don’t know?'”

According to Goggins, the producer advised him that it might be a good idea to get a tetanus shot just in case. “So I did go to the hospital, and I got a shot.”

“So, in other words, they got a call from the lawyers at HBO,” Kimmel teased.

Goggins replied, “That’s exactly what happened. And they made me sign that day! Somebody just kinda came up — ‘I’m sorry you’re not feeling too good. Listen, can you just sign this little bitty piece of paper?’ I thought, ‘You want my autograph, or I’ve just lost all of my rights?'”

Goggins recently opened up about his deep fear of snakes while speaking with Entertainment Weekly about the season 3, episode 3 scene, which he described as “a horror show” for him. 

“It was a nightmare for me — really, genuinely,” he said. “It was two days of like, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ and they had somebody right off camera, as soon as I would pick a snake up, I’d bring it over and put it in their arms like, ‘Oh my God,’ and almost f—ing pass out every time.”

Watch Goggins relive the terror in the clip above.