‘The Righteous Gemstones’: Walton Goggins Reveals Deleted Baby Billy Scene With Snakes

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 Episode 8, “On Your Belly You Shall Go.”]

The Righteous Gemstones‘ latest episode was a close call for star Walton Goggins, who nearly faced his biggest fear of snakes again following his character’s close call with the creatures in The White Lotus.

In the final season’s eighth installment, “On Your Belly You Shall Go,” Baby Billy (Goggins) finds himself being held captive alongside brother-in-law Eli (John Goodman) after they’re kidnapped by Lori’s (Megan Mullally) ex-husband Cobb (Michael Rooker), who happens to own an alligator farm. After the men were poisoned by darts they awoke to find themselves trapped in a custodial closet with one of Lori’s missing exes, “Big Dick” Mitch.

When Cobb entered the room, it was clear that the former husband of Eli’s recent flame had a taste for extreme measures. In the end, Eli and Baby Billy are able to loosen their restraints to escape, also setting Mitch free in the process, as Cobb is distracted by visiting police. When Cobb catches on to what’s happening, he kills the police, his young colleague, and Mitch to run after Eli and Baby Billy, shooting at the men through the park.

HBO

Ultimately, Cobb’s son Corey (Seann William Scott) shows up and stabs the man in the back, pushing him into the water where a hungry alligator is waiting and devours him. But according to Goggins, the shootout scene was almost entirely different.

The actor, whose fear of snakes was revealed during The White Lotus Season 3 press tour tells TV Insider, “I did a movie with Olivia Colman about snakes, Them That Follow, and it was the worst experience of my life… we put the [snake scenes at the] end of the schedule, so I forgot that it was really a movie about snakes until I actually had to work with them for two days,” Goggins recalls.  “And then the same thing happened with The White Lotus.”

When it came to this alligator farm-set installment of Gemstones, Goggins reveals, “What people don’t know is I didn’t get that script early on when I got it, I wasn’t around an alligator, but in the aquarium there were snakes, right? But that’s not how the story was originally written.”

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Goggins goes on to share, “The story originally was written that [Baby Billy and Eli get] hunkered down under some cages of snakes, and then the bullets hit the cage and the snakes fall out on us. I am not joking, man, like I am not joking,” Goggins reiterates. So, why the change? It wasn’t so much to do with Goggins’ own personal fear of snakes, but rather because of time.

“We had to modify that, and literally the day before I was gonna call them and say, ‘Guys, I can’t do this, man. You don’t understand. I can’t do it.’ So, luckily, I didn’t have [to handle snakes]. I might not have come back from it,” the star admits.

What do you think of this deleted scene revelation? Let us know in the comments section below, and stay tuned for the series finale of The Righteous Gemstones as the last episode arrives Sunday, May 4.

The Righteous Gemstones, Sundays, 10/9c, HBO and Max