Spring is in the air, or hinting at it, anyway. But our cover model today is glad to be a little chilly after spending months in a Thai heat wave.
Michelle Monaghan, one of the stars of the new season of “The White Lotus,” joins me on Zoom looking like she walked straight out of the ’90s. Her structured leather jacket, complete with neck flap, is a thing of grunge-inspired beauty. “It’s a bit of a Cinderella moment,” she says. If Cinderella was a biker. Or Monaghan’s “White Lotus” co-star Parker Posey, a real-life ’90s indie queen.
“She’s one of the most thoughtful, soulful women,” Monaghan raves of Posey. “She’s sage. She gives wise advice. She’s ethereal, but she’s grounded. I always call her a little bit of a witch, you know? I’d come over and knock on her door and she’d just have all of these kinds of lotions and potions. She’s like, ‘Come in here, try this, smell this.’ She was an incredible person to have on set, because she is so beloved by actors, and for the way that she takes up her space. It’s like an acting class, you know, the way that she improvs and she interacts with props. She’s just an amazing actress.”
The shout-out to Posey and other women in Monaghan’s life will be a recurring theme in our conversation. It’s a real sisterhood move, one that couldn’t be more at odds with her toxic female trio in “The White Lotus.”
Monaghan is part of the stellar ensemble cast in the hit HBO show’s third season, whose fifth episode just aired. “I’m as much a fan as anyone else,” she says, adding that she’s long been an admirer of creator Mike White’s spiritual insights.
“He’s a great observer of human behavior,” she reflects. “He sees everything and everyone. You know everything that he writes really comes from a place of authenticity.”
For devoted viewers, Monaghan teases a reveal that’s coming down the pike. “I think as we progress through the season, people are going to be shocked at how he wrote this a few years ago. Talk about being a seer! People are going to be like, ‘How did he know that?’”
She’s joining me from London, where she’s shooting the action-comedy “The Family Plan 2” with Mark Wahlberg, before heading home to LA to her family, husband Peter White, an Australian graphic artist, and their teen daughter and tween son. But today we’re here to talk about Thailand — specifically, the months she spent shooting this season of White’s famously vicious whodunit anthology, set mainly on the northeastern coast of the stunning island of Koh Samui.
There are, per the formula, several storylines revolving around various guests. Monaghan’s character, Jaclyn, is an actor who’s been famous for decades. “I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, that hits a little close to home,’” she says with a laugh. “And then I got access to all eight episodes, I binge-read them, and I thought, ‘Holy s – – t, he’s done it again!’”
Monaghan, 48, is an Iowa native who worked as a model while in college, then began to appear in films and TV in the early aughts, including the 2005 noir-comedy gem “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” She’s been Tom Cruise’s love interest in three “Mission: Impossible” movies. Between her pairings with Wahlberg in “The Family Plan” sequel and 2016’s “Patriots Day,” and her dynamo performance in 2007’s Ben Affleck-directed “Gone Baby Gone,” I tell her I’ve always thought of her as a Boston person. “I get that a lot!” she says. “And I don’t even think I had an accent in ‘Gone Baby Gone.’” I bet she would have crushed it, though.
In White’s show, Monaghan’s character is on vacation with two childhood friends (Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb) who seem, at first glance, to adore one another — but that facade crumbles quickly. “It’s so cringey, it’s so relatable!” says Monaghan. “Of course this is heightened [in the show], but we can all recognize times in our lives where we have this kind of toxic positivity. They’re presenting kind of their best selves, and then, you know, inevitably, we start to see the cracks in their ‘perfect’ lives.”
Monaghan’s storyline also ties into a cultural conversation about aging in Hollywood, a topic explored in recent movies such as “The Last Showgirl” and “The Substance.” Here, Monaghan’s friends snark about her when she’s out of the room, picking apart everything from her marriage to a younger man to whether (or how much) she’s had work done. But Jaclyn’s not the only one in this trio who comes in for scrutiny. Whenever one is out of the room, the other two go to town. “There’s this constant comparison that women oftentimes have with each other, and with themselves,” says Monaghan. “This was something that Mike’s witnessed a lot of in his life with friendships — the way that we endure those things and also perpetuate them.”
Monaghan, who has maintained a meditation practice for the past several years, says she was taken with the show’s through line of spirituality, and loved the spiritual Thai locations they visited for the shoot. She points to a comment by her castmate, Natasha Rothwell (she plays Belinda, a character we first met in Season 1), about how all guests this season arrive with some sort of spiritual deficit. “You can see they’re all kind of struggling,” Monaghan says.
The struggle was also intensely physical. “I mean, it just kept getting hotter and hotter. I think it wound up being the hottest summer on record. Even Thai folks were like, ‘This is too hot.’”
But Monaghan says White still made the steamy set (most of the production was shot at the Four Seasons Koh Samui as well as three Anantara luxury resorts in the area) a playground for the actors. “He puts his magic wand on it. When you’ve got a bunch of people living together and, you know, interacting and befriending one another — it’s a special experience, for sure.”
White also arranged for a monk to give the hotel a traditional Thai Spirit House blessing. “The cast and the crew were all there,” Monaghan recalls. “That was really important to Mike, for us to take part in that. It was actually quite emotional. There was a lot of chanting. I won’t forget that day. It was really beautiful.”
As with previous seasons, the guests at the White Lotus are almost always wearing something beautiful and unforgettable. But when the cameras were off, Monaghan says, it was a different story. “You see the show and everyone’s dressed to the nines. In real life, we would be in T-shirts, greasy, hair tied back, sweating,” she says with a laugh. “By the time we got home, I think everybody wanted to burn their clothes!”
Our spring shoot with Monaghan took place in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood, though not without a hitch: Our original location in Topanga Canyon was eerily derailed by a blaze, just a few months before January’s devastating countywide wildfires. Though Monaghan’s house was fortunately unaffected, she says, “everyone knows someone that lost [their houses]. We have multiple friends that have lost everything, and several more that have been displaced.”
When the shoot eventually happened, Monaghan donned a series of pieces from Gucci, Valentino and Giambattista Valli. Her favorite? An eye-catching, light-catching beaded gown from Oscar de la Renta. “That dress was so amazing,” she says. “It was incredible, all these tiny little crystals. Just beautiful. What a fun day playing dress-up!”
On the rare day she’s not jetting around for work, “I really love to bake,” she says. “I don’t even really have a sweet tooth, I just think there’s something meditative about the exactness of it. I’ll bake a bunch of banana or pumpkin bread and take it over to the neighbors.”
This is a highly Iowa thing to do, I observe. “It totally is, oh my god!” she says.
She and her family go back to visit her parents in the Iowa countryside every summer, and she always looks forward to living it up Midwestern-style. This is a woman who knows country life: As a teenager, she won blue ribbons wrestling hogs at the county fair. Nowadays, she takes it a little easier. “Drinking beer outside, playing cornhole, lightning bugs, s’mores — that’s my jam, that’s my speed,” she says.
Last fall, she hit a meaningful family milestone. “I was teaching my daughter how to drive in the town I grew up in, which is, like, a town of seven people,” she says. “It’s very chill, there’s not even a stoplight. So that was a really cool, full circle moment. A realization of how far I’ve come, and all the wonderful things I have in my life.”
Photographer: Sami Drasin; Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Ashley Pruitt; Hair: Bridget Brager at The Wall Group; Makeup: Kara Yoshimoto Bua at A-Frame Agency using Chanel Beauty; Manicure: Stephanie Stone at Forward Artists using Chanel; Photo Editor: Jessica Hober; Talent Booker: Patty Adams Martinez
