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I can rattle off on one hand the movies I’ve worked on with women,” Michelle Monaghan laughs. As if to prove her point, she begins to count the sausage fests she’s been in and quickly runs out of fingers. Hollywood’s most prolific wife, girlfriend and partner-in-peril, Monaghan has spent 25 years in film and television romantically involved with everyone from Tom Cruise and Adam Sandler to Woody Harrelson and Jake Gyllenhaal.
These were all different kinds of wife and girlfriend, I should add – tortured and restless while caught between Harrelson and Matthew McConaughy in True Detective; tough and resourceful when kidnapped by Philip Seymour Hoffman and averting deadly missiles in the Mission: Impossible movies. It’s not as if Monaghan has spent nearly three decades chopping vegetables in kitchen scenes and applying lotion to her hands before climbing into bed. But still. Even when you’re counting Gone Baby Gone – where she solved a missing persons case with Casey Affleck – or her star-making turn as a struggling actor in Shane Black’s frothy crime comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang… it’s been a hell of a lot of dudes.
“I don’t know if I even noticed it for a long time,” the 48-year-old says today, while dressed in a luxe power suit in a London hotel room, where she’s promoting the third season of The White Lotus, that sensational semi-annual parade of the rich, white and loathsome. “When I started acting, that was just what it was. If you were in a movie, you had a lot of male co-stars. If you were watching a movie, you were watching a lot of guys. It was the culture. It’s what was served on a plate for us and what we ate up.”
She also didn’t notice it because it was never really an issue for her. Monaghan admits to being an eternal optimist, and says she’s led a very charmed life in the industry – there’s been no drama, no scandal, no attempts to undermine her voice on male-heavy sets. “[On Kiss Kiss Bang Bang], Robert Downey Jr was like my mentor, and so good to me and generous,” she says. “And then I went on to work with Tom Cruise, who I hold in such high esteem. Those experiences were the foundation of my career, you know? And only ever empowered me.” Later, when I blanch at yet another story of a divine male co-star (George Clooney, that time), she seems to clock my cynicism. “I know how I sound, but I’m telling you – they’ve all been so lovely!” she boasts. “I’ve had good fortune, what can I say?”
Monaghan embodies an abstract kind of famous. “She was in that thing,” she once joked. “The romantic comedy we watched on the plane, maybe?” Her face is incredibly striking (she was, inevitably, a model before she began acting), but also chameleon-like – you could imagine her being the result of a lab experiment involving DNA pilfered from Jennifer Garner, Katie Holmes, Kate Beckinsale and Ruth Wilson. On screen, even in an underwritten role, she carries with her a strength and a grit, something likely fostered in her upbringing – she grew up in a tiny rural community in Iowa with a population of just 772 people, her father worked in a factory, her mother in a daycare centre. Little-seen indie films such as 2008’s grimy yet hopeful Trucker fully lean into that mettle she has; a testosterone-heavy series like True Detective seemed to stumble upon it almost by accident. In everything, though, Monaghan inspires a whisper of comfortable familiarity rather than stone-cold recognition. Perhaps, that is, until this month.
In the new season of The White Lotus, which arrives on 17 February, Monaghan gives what could be described as a star-reminding performance, at once radiant and completely unbearable. But then unbearable is a minimum requirement for The White Lotus. Mike White’s perceptive satire – broadcast on HBO in the US and Sky in the UK – collects under-the-radar character actors like infinity stones, flies them to the fictional holiday resort franchise of the title and provides them with prickly creations to play. This year, alongside an (almost) entirely new ensemble cast that includes Walton Goggins, Parker Posey, Jason Isaacs and Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood, Monaghan stars as one of a trio of lifelong friends who visit the Thai branch of The White Lotus for a week of sun, spirituality and latent passive aggression.
He said he had to cut me out of the movie and my response was literally, ‘Do I have to give my salary back?’
She, Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb – yes, Monaghan has actual female co-stars here – play women who existed on an even playing field as teenagers but now have vastly different lives. Monaghan is a famous TV actor, Bibb has married rich, and Coon is a stressed single mum. All are irritable, exhausted and subtly mean, dressing up their cruelty about one another in faux concern.
“Mike had witnessed friendships in his life, and particularly female friendships, that just perpetuate comparisons, and the judgement that we put on ourselves compared to others,” she says. “He’s like, man, women have it rough out there!” She laughs. “But I was really heartened by that – that he can write these women in a very fun, heightened kind of way, while also making them feel very real and relatable.”
White wanted the friends to come off like “a big, blonde blob”, Monaghan remembers, with her audition consisting of lines of dialogue from each of the three characters, as if they were interchangeable. When she was hired, she was given all eight scripts for the season – a rarity in television – and read them front-to-back over the course of a flight from Los Angeles to Australia.
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How did she feel about being a successful actor playing a successful actor? She winces. “I’m gonna be honest,” she says. “It was a little bit awkward and confronting. Like, page one: famous TV actress who lives in Malibu? That hits a little close to home, I’m not gonna lie.” But as she read on, she saw the differences between them. Jaclyn, her character, being sort of awful, for one. “She’s her own unique person, absolutely,” she says, which is putting it rather nicely. “And that was comforting.”
Without giving too much away (journalists were given only the first two episodes of the season), one of the major tensions underpinning the dynamic between Jaclyn, Bibb’s Kate and Coon’s Laurie is that Jaclyn – who has become infinitely wealthy over the course of their friendship – paid for the Thailand trip out of her own pocket. And while she promises it’s no big deal, you’re not quite sure if you believe her. It’s a gift. Maybe. It won’t require anything in return. Sort of. It’s a one-off. Ish. Inevitably, it becomes an issue.
I’m curious if Monaghan, given her working-class background, has grappled with those kinds of scenarios herself. “It would be naïve to say there isn’t an awareness around where I came from and how I live now,” she says. “But I think the things that sustain you as a person, and in the industry I’m in, are the things that remain with you all the time. Your values, your relationships, and those very basic things. For me, those things have stayed the same. Those have been fundamental to me.”
If Monaghan’s career has always seemed to trundle along at a steady simmer, it may be because it happened by accident. “Becoming an actress wasn’t something I dreamt of doing,” she says. “It was just something I, honest to God, kind of fell into. I only thought of it as a way to pay off my college loans.” While studying journalism in Chicago, she modelled on the side to make ends meet, and slowly transitioned to acting on a whim.
In those early days, she had the awkward distinction of winding up on the cutting room floor with eerie regularity. Her role as Richard Gere’s co-worker in the erotic thriller Unfaithful was reduced to a single line, while significant supporting turns in the Keanu Reeves comic-book movie Constantine and George Clooney’s Oscar-winning political thriller Syriana were completely excised – she had played Reeves’s demonic ex in the former, and a beauty queen married off to a wealthy Arab in the latter. I tell Monaghan that I’d probably plunge into an existential crisis if I was new to acting and kept being cut from the movies I was cast in, but she admits she wasn’t too bothered by it.
“I think what was helpful was that I had a very strong sense of self by then,” she says. “I’d already travelled the world as a model, so I knew how to stick up for myself and advocate for myself. I’d developed such a thick skin by the time I started acting that I didn’t have an ego about it.”
She remembers being called up by Francis Lawrence, the director of Constantine, who was incredibly apologetic. “He said he had to cut me out of the movie, just because of how long the movie was getting, and my response was literally, ‘Do I have to give my salary back?’” She cringes. “Like I was so green at that point that I genuinely thought you have to give back the money if you get cut from a movie, and I’d been paying off my loans with it already. So it was only super practical stuff that I was worried about.”
Monaghan has an uncanny ability to always look on the bright side of things. She got a lovely hand-written note from Clooney apologising profusely for her Syriana vanishing. And the cut footage from Constantine eventually got into the hands of filmmaker JJ Abrams, who then invited Monaghan to audition for his Mission: Impossible III. “Isn’t that crazy?” she beams. “I’m telling you – it’s the universe looking out for me. I firmly believe everything happens for a reason. So often things that on paper look like setbacks have ended up being really great for me in the long run.”
She remains a big fan of Cruise, who she’s worked with on three of the Mission: Impossibles. I wonder, though, if she receives the infamous “Tom Cruise cake” – the vaguely apocryphal coconut treat that Cruise reportedly sends to every one of his co-stars and collaborators on their birthdays and/or at Christmas.
“Of course I get the Tom Cruise cake,” Monaghan shoots back, as if I’ve asked the most ludicrous question in the world. “I get it every year and I love it.”
I’ve never met anyone who’s received one, I tell her.
“Oh, it’s annual and it’s so serious!”
Please, I insist, tell me absolutely everything about it.
“OK,” she begins. “Well, it’s coconut and it comes with a little ornament on it, because it’s sent during the holidays. And it says, you know, ‘warm greetings, Tom Cruise’.”
She’s not done.
“And it is so moist, so dense, and just the most unbelievably delicious cake you’ve ever eaten in your life.”
I believe her. But I imagine that even if it did taste horrible, Monaghan – of all people – would be able to put a good spin on it. In fact, Monaghan is so enthusiastic and upbeat about this cake that I’m convinced she may have seen God in it. Or maybe she’s just spent a bit too long at The White Lotus.
‘The White Lotus’ arrives on Sky Atlantic on Monday 17 February, and will be available to stream on Sky Go and Now
