Walton Goggins stars in “A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plummer.”
Walton Goggins has plenty of reasons to be happy right now. He just scored an Emmy nomination for his role as Rick Hatchett from The White Lotus Season 3, which comes a year after scoring an Emmy nod nod for playing The Ghoul in Fallout.
And now, Goggins is happy that he had a blast starring as the title character in his new film short — A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plumber — and even happier that said film is as close to making an adult film as he’s ever going to get.
“That’s what I thought when they came to me with this,” Goggins said, laughing, during a recent Zoom conversation. “It’s gonna have this music, Everybody’s gonna kind of have this [adult film]
vibe and it was shot in Los Angeles. Come on! I mean, we were overlooking the San Fernando Valley!”
Instead of being a Boogie Nights reboot, though, A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plumber is a 3-minute laugh-out-loud funny, innuendo-filled Doritos Golden Sriracha Film to promote Frito-Lay’s Doritos Golden Sriracha tortilla chips. Like the film, the Doritos Golden Sriracha chip flavor seems like it’s going to be too hot and spicy, but beneath the surface is a taste that knows where the line is drawn.
Or, as Doritos puts it, the Golden Srirachas chip delivers a “perfectly balanced blend of yellow and green srirachas” that “delivers a sweet, tangy subtle spice that slowly warms things up without ever getting too explicit.”
“A Spicy but not Too Spicy Plumber” poster.
“It was very cool, the messaging in this, because it’s a short film and the chip itself is a story,” Goggins said. “You expect one thing and you get something else. People think of sriracha that’s sitting in our refrigerator … and you have this idea of what this is going to taste like as if you’re gonna have to run and drink a glass of water.”
And, as Goggins discovered, the new Doritos chip delivers on the promise: It’s spicy but not too spicy.
“I tasted the chip before we started filming — and all of a sudden it’s this savory, kind of sweet, soft thing that kind of sits in your mouth for a long time — even that can be that could be used as a commercial,” Goggins said, laughing.
Of course, the fun part for Goggins’ is that in A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plumber, Goggins title character arrives at a house and finds himself in a seedy scenario thanks to the short film’s suggestive tone, music and characters — including The Bombshell (Katie Baker), The Roommate (Mark St. Cyr) and The Cougar (Carolyn Hennesy).
As it turns out, The Plumber is just there to do his job and fix a leaky pipe under a kitchen sink.
“This is exactly what they’re saying with this world of A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plumber — that things that can be taken with a sexual kind of undertone, when in fact, he’s just being literal,” Goggins explained. “There is something big in my pocket — and it’s a wrench that I’m going to fix your pipe with because I think your pipes need fixing.”
You can watch the entire short film below.
Walton Goggins Says He Made One Big Suggestion For ‘A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plumber’
Of course, Walton Goggins has done short films before — remember his Baby Billy Freeman’s Health Elixir spot in The Righteous Gemstones? — and clearly knows about getting into a character’s frame of mind when doing so.
For realizing his read on The Plumber in A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plumber, Goggins followed the lead of Björn Rühmann — the short film’s director of innuendo (that’s how he’s billed in the credits) — to set the stage for a very eventful 3-minute ride.
“Björn is so adept at this medium and telling a story in a very specific way with his storyboards and working with Frito-Lay,” Goggins said. “They were so spot on and so specific. They had a vision from the very beginning.”
While Goggins followed Rühmann’s lead for the film short, he said he did make one suggestion that helps conclude A Spicy But Not Too Spicy Plumber, where a pizza deliveryman (Kyle Buttenhoff) shows up at the house and asks, “Did anyone order an extra-large sausage?”
“I said, ‘Listen, I think you’ve got to bring it back around until the story is complete. You think [The Plumber] is one thing, and then he looks at the camera and says, ‘I did,’” Goggins said, laughing. “So, this party can go anywhere, right? You’re playing with expectations versus the reality and that’s the experience of these chips.”
Note: Some quotes in this interview feature were condensed or edited for clarity.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timlammers/2025/07/30/walton-goggins-talks-spicy-new-role-in-doritos-golden-sriracha-film-short/