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With
a coterie of leading men that reads like a list of the
Sexiest Men Alive winners, Michelle Monaghan is
certainly living every woman’s dream. Throw in Patrick
“McDreamy” Dempsey as her latest for the feel-good
romantic comedy Made of Honor, what more could a girl
want?
WHEN
Michelle Monaghan was offered a starring role
in the Sony Pictures romantic comedy Made of Honor,
she had no trouble relating to the story of a woman who
is getting married and asks her best male friend to be
her “maid of honor.” v “It was funny because when Sony
approached me and explained they were doing something
really modern that had never been done before, I was
like, ‘Actually I did it two years ago!’” the
32-year-old actress recalls with a laugh.
The
down-to-earth former model is referring to the fact that
two years ago, she got married to Australian graphic
artist Peter White and her ‘man of honor,’ as she called
him, was her best friend Mark. “Mark and I have been in
each other’s lives as best friends for 15 years,” she
says. “I remember introducing him to my future husband
and being really worried because it was important to me
that they got along. When they did, I was so happy I
could have them both!”
In
Made of Honor, Michelle Monaghan and Patrick Dempsey
of Grey’s Anatomy fame play Hannah and Tom, best
friends for 10 years. When Hannah goes to Scotland for a
job, Tom realizes he is lost without her, but before he
can make this confession, she returns with a fiancé and
asks Tom to be her “maid of honor.” He reluctantly
accepts and then sets about sabotaging the wedding so he
can woo her back.
Michelle
has already established an impressive list of credits,
including
Mission:
Impossible 3, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Gone Baby Gone and The Bourne Supremacy. But she jumped at the
chance to explore her goofier side on film in this
feel-good comedy. “Mission: Impossible 3
was the blockbuster that really helped me break
through,” she explains, “and I had just completed
Gone Baby Gone and Heartbreak Kid but hadn’t
done a full-blown romantic comedy. So I read this script
and really liked it for obvious reasons, as well as the
fact I’m a huge fan of Patrick Dempsey and Grey’s
Anatomy, although I was too embarrassed to tell him
that!” she chuckles.
Michelle
says her own wedding provided plenty of research for the
role. “I could relate to planning a wedding because I’d
been through my own, when we got married in Port Douglas
in
Australia,”
she says. “I know all about picking out the dress and
all that fun stuff, and what girl doesn’t want to plan
her wedding again?”
This
time around, though, Michelle jokes, she had a bigger
budget when it came to choosing her wedding dress. “For
me when I got married, I had a dress I’d bought at a
flea market that I had to dye from blue to white and I
never got to do the whole bridal shopping thing, so it
was fun for me to try on racks of wedding dresses and
see what I really would have chosen if money was no
object.”
The
actress also strongly identified with her character
Hannah, a strong and successful woman who is looking for
Mr. Right, but doesn’t realize he’s right in front of
her. “And I loved this woman because she doesn’t think
twice about asking a man to be her ‘maid of honor,’” she
adds. “It’s a modern take on a traditional wedding, and
I find a lot of women have significant male friends in
their lives these days, so I like the idea that our
movie is about a man standing up for you at the altar!”
LOVE AT SECOND SIGHT.
In
Made of
Honor, Monaghan and Dempsey play decadelong best friends
who find themselves in a tight fix when one discovers
there’s more between them than just friendship.
To the
envy of women everywhere, Michelle has had plenty of men
stand up for her onscreen. In fact, the leading men
she’s already worked with sound like a list of Sexiest
Men Alive winners: Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr., Brad
Pitt, Casey Affleck, Matt Damon and George Clooney.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she agrees. “Sometimes I’ll
even forget myself and I’ll be watching TV and see Brad
Pitt and think, ‘I wonder what he’s like’ and then I’m
like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve worked with him, I know what he’s
like!’ Somehow I feel like I’m living someone else’s
life, that’s how separate I feel my life is.”
Michelle
confesses while she was a fan of Dempsey before working
with him, she discovered another side to his talent
during the making of this film. “I knew him as McDreamy
and wasn’t surprised at his dramatic acting, because he
carries a lot of weight in Grey’s Anatomy,” she
elaborates, “but I was also impressed with his physical
comedy. Throughout the course of working with him, I
found out he went to mime school and he can juggle and
it all started to make sense, the way he could use his
body for comedy.”
Tackling
her own physical comedy in the film was intimidating,
Michelle admits. “There is definitely stuff in there I
got to do that was very challenging because you can’t
prepare to be funny. Doing a drama, you can prepare for
months what you want to achieve and create in the course
of a scene, but with this film, it’s all about having
chemistry and rapport and being open to improvising and
making an ass out of yourself by doing whatever you need
to do to make people laugh.”
Becoming
a movie star was not part of Michelle’s plan growing up
in Winthrop, Iowa, a town of 700. She took up part-time
modeling to put herself through a journalism degree at
Chicago’s Columbia College and then dropped out one
semester short of graduating to go and live in New York.
“I was at the point where I realized I was going to have
to move back to Iowa as a journalist and start in small
markets, but I really loved the city,” she says. “It
floors me now looking back, because I was a straight ‘A’
student and thousands of dollars in debt, but when I
told my parents, they said, ‘You’ve always had a good
head on your shoulders, so go for it’ and they believed
in me and so I believed in myself.”
When
Michelle moved to
New York,
her modeling career continued but she eventually found
her true passion when a casting agent who couldn’t find
an actress for a TV role came to the modeling agency as
a last resort. “I auditioned for fun, and three hours
later I was on a plane to Boston to shoot the show,” she
recalls of her two-episode debut on the TV show Young
Americans. Eight episodes on the David Kelly legal
drama Boston Public followed and then she landed
a role in the film Unfaithful. “That was the
turning point for me,” Michelle recalls, “because I was
in a movie with Richard Gere and
Diane Lane,
and that’s when I really knew I wanted to do this for a
career and not just to pay off my debts.”
Just
before that big break, Michelle had met her future
husband, graphic designer Peter White, in a
New York
bar. “He was with a bunch of Aussie friends and within
five minutes he had me laughing, and I immediately knew
he was the one,” she beams as she tells the story. “It
was seven years ago and I was still doing deodorant
commercials, so it had nothing to do with what I did for
a living back then! We were lucky we met when we did,”
she adds gratefully, “because we’ve been able to
experience each other’s success together and we’ve both
come a long way.”
***Opening soon across the
Philippines,
Made of Honor is distributed by Columbia Pictures, the
local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. |
