Michelle Monaghan might often find herself cast as the significant other of a male lead who drives a film or a series, but within those confines she routinely finds ways to make her own indelible mark. She did that in a smoldering turn opposite Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as Maggie Hart in the groundbreaking first season of the HBO crime anthology series True Detective ; as Angie Gennaro, the detective and romantic partner of Casey Affleck’s private eye Patrick Kenzie in the Ben Affleck-directed adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Dorchester mystery novel Gone Baby Gone ; and in films that include Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Trucker, Source Code, Patriot’s Day . And she often shows up as Julia Meade, the secreted wife of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character in the Mission: Impossible films, a run that began with her harrowing kidnapping by a Hunt nemesis played by the late Phil Seymour Hoffman, in the J.
J. Abrams-directed Mission: Impossible III. She’ll next be stealing scenes as the estranged wife of Vince Vaughn in Bad Monkey , the Florida -set Apple TV+ series adaptation of the Carl Hiaasen novel, crafted for series by the Ted Lasso executive producer Bill Lawrence.
Vaughn plays a detective who was suspended for using his car to bump his ex’s husband’s golf cart into the drink — with him on it. Throw in a severed arm that puts the cop on the scent of a sprawling real estate scandal and murders, and that is Bad Monkey. The series premieres next Friday.
Monaghan’s character hasn’t cooled on her ex, but she is as elusive as liquid mercury to him. Watch to discover how Monaghan learned to create such memorable characters..
