For a long while, Michelle Monaghan was the sort of actress whom you recognized immediately as “famous” but couldn’t quite place. (“Oh, she was in that thing! Right? The . . . uh, romantic comedy we watched on the plane maybe?”) But that changed when she starred in a series that dominated nearly all cocktail-party conversations for a three-month span this past winter: HBO’s True Detective.
Sitting by the window at a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant—sunlight dousing her in such a way that it’s possible to believe it just follows her wherever she goes—Monaghan looks like she’s playing an impossibly chic New Yorker in a Liz Lemon dream sequence about a fancy lunch date. Since the release of the 2005 cult classic Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (“I wouldn’t have the career I have if it wasn’t for that role,” she says), Monaghan has carved out a varied career that includes hard-boiled dramas (Gone Baby Gone), punnily-titled romantic comedies (Made of Honor), and high-concept thrillers (Source Code). But her turn as Maggie—who was engaged romantically with both Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey)—is what, for many Americans, landed her firmly on the cultural radar.
As True Detective’s lone main female character, Monaghan was inadvertently at the center of some controversy early on in the show’s run, as critics derided what they felt were underwritten female characters and a misogynistic undercurrent. “I really thought that that was just such a misguided criticism,” Monaghan tells me. “I kept waiting and [saying] ‘O.K., just keep watching, just keep watching.’ I thought people might view it differently after they saw the season as a whole.”
Monaghan says that everyone involved “understood [they] were doing something special” during the months-long shoot. “We read the first page and we thought, Wow, this is extraordinary,” she says. She wasn’t necessarily prepared, though, for the intensity of the theory-sprouting, clue-scrutinizing tornado that would engulf the country (well, the Internet, at least) when the show aired. “I did not expect for it to take off and resonate the way that it did, especially with conspiracy theories and things like that,” she said. “People thought maybe my character [was behind the murders]. I was stunned.”
If you’d guess working with Harrelson and McConaughey every day would be a trip, the way Monaghan smirks and leans back slightly when asked about the nearly mythic duo confirms that to be the case. “Their trailers are very representative of their personalities,” she says. “Woody’s got this old-school bus, like a hippie bus—it’s so fun and it’s got solar panels and it’s all painted on the outside . . . And then right next to it you’ve got this beautiful Airstream trailer that’s been refurbished by Matthew. And he’s got his barbeque out there, and his picnic table, and lawn chairs. You see that these guys are very unique as individuals, but together, they’re just two peas in a pod.” She said she doesn’t believe her character, Maggie, ultimately belonged with either of them (“I never felt a loyalty to either one”), recounting that she and writer Nic Pizzolatto had worked out Maggie’s romantic trajectory (“He had decided that she had moved on, she had re-married . . . she married up, so to speak”).
Monaghan says she has heard from a few actors potentially in the mix for roles on the show’s second season, who have asked for her advice. And what did she have to tell them? “The writing’s on the wall—it just is,” Monaghan says. “You’re in such good hands; [Pizzolatto’s] words are just a dream for an actor . . . As in any role, just be as grounded as you can in the material.”
Now that the first season of True Detective—and the corresponding frenzy—has died down, Monaghan is back to the movie-making grind, no doubt hoping the buzz from the zeitgeist-y show will provide her some momentum. She has four films coming out in the near future, including the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Best of Me, the Chris Evans romantic comedy Playing It Cool, and the just-wrapped Pixels, in which she plays a weapons developer and Adam Sandler’s love interest.
But her first post-True Detective release is the independent film Fort Bliss, released this past weekend (now out on Video on Demand), in which, curiously, Monaghan plays another Maggie. (“I look like a Maggie,” she laughs, to which I nod vigorously, even though I feel she looks more like a Chloe or a Vivian.) Monaghan plays a U.S. Army medic and single mother who returns from a tour of duty in Afghanistan to her five-year-old son (Oakes Fegley), with whom she has a strained—to put it mildly—relationship. As Monaghan talks about the film, it seems less like she’s talking about a “job,” and more like she’s talking about a spiritual awakening. She trained extensively for the film (which shot over just 28 days on a “micro-budget”) and met with many members of the army beforehand to understand her character’s mindset. “I took the idea of portraying a solider very seriously,” she explains. “I questioned whether I would be able to be believable as a soldier—that frightened me. It frightened me so much that I did it to the best of my ability. And I asked a lot of questions.” She laughs at me when I ask if she was able to “push aside” the character at the end of each day of filming. “Absolutely not,” she says. “I don’t know if I still have fully, completely let go of this character. This is someone who is very real to me.”
Monaghan’s character is sexually assaulted in the film, an aspect she said came up again and again when she spoke with the female soldiers. “Nearly every single woman I spoke with had experienced sexual assault in one form or another—at different levels, of course,” Monaghan says. “I can’t speak for these women but I will say something that was really fascinating to me, personally and professionally, is that whenever these woman spoke about any of their experiences—whether about sexual experiences or anything—they were very grounded and very matter of fact . . . I knew when I started production that I needed to convey exactly that. Because what I understood from them is that on some level they’re not asking for empathy or compassion. They just want their story to be told and to be recognized and to be acknowledged.”
With two children of her own, Monaghan said she was able to draw on her own experiences in crafting the character, as she has many times had to spend up to a month away from her two children for work. “I know what it’s like to leave home and miss my children and feel slightly guilty I’m not there,” she says. “But I also think one of the greatest gifts you can give your children is to go and do something you’re extraordinarily proud of. To be able to share that with your children and allow them to see the gratitude you have for your job, and the experiences and growth that comes from that, is really the greatest thing.”
