Michelle Monaghan: ‘Of course I get Tom Cruise cake!’

Adam White, The Independent

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.