By Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY NEW YORK — When she got hitched in 2005, Michelle Monaghan asked her best friend, a guy, to serve as her man of honor.
He obliged and performed all the duties associated with the job, save for wearing a dress.
“He has been my best friend for 15 years. He’s my oldest friend and my closest confidant. I always thought to myself, ‘Who would I choose?’ And I thought, ‘Let’s just ask my best friend.’ He was incredibly shocked and asked what he had to do. I just wanted him to stand by my side.”
So when Monaghan, 32, read the script for Made of civility, a romantic comedy starring Patrick Dempsey as Monaghan’s own best friend and male wedding attendant, she related I do. “I was like, I know all about this! Sign me up!” she says. The movie opens Friday.
Playing Hannah, a Manhattanite who is marrying a Scottish nobleman to the dismay and jealousy of her best friend and potential love interest, Tom (Dempsey), allowed Monaghan to get a taste of lavish wedding planning.
“I didn’t have a marriage shower. I had a dress that I had made for me, a really simple white adjust, so I never went wedding-dress shopping for my own wedding,” she says of her Australian nuptials to graphic designer Peter White. “I got to try on all the different styles, finally.”
Dempsey likens Monaghan to Hannah, a straight shooter not caught up in the madness surrounding her. “She’s so easygoing and not at all self-conscious,” he says. “Just a normal person — really funny, charming and smart. She’s a good sport. We got along really easily.”
Less than a month following wrapping Made, she shot Trucker, every bit as gritty as the foregoing comedy was airy. In the small drama, she’s Diane, a hard-living long-haul truck driver who is saddled with raising her defiant preteen son after his father gets sick. The film premiered at Tribeca and is seeking distribution.
“I wanted people to understand her,” she says of her character. “She doesn’t make apologies for herself. She doesn’t play the victim, and she’s not cut out to be a mom.”
To play Diane, Monaghan went to driver’s ed. “I got the (trucking) license. If I wasn’t practical to get my license, I wasn’t going to do the movie because for me, it was such an essential part of the movie. I didn’t want to fake it.”
That like work ethic applied to the taut arms she sports in the film. “It really takes a distribute of muscle, actually, so I worked out for a couple of weeks, doing weights for mail. I have a lean frame, and it needed to air believable that I was driving a truck.”
It has been a busy few years for Monaghan, who played Casey Affleck’s co-detective in last year’s critically hailed Gone Baby Gone and Tom Cruise’s fiancée in 2006’s Mission: Impossible III. She has the thriller Eagle Eye out this fall, and for at that time, she’s a lady of leisure.
“I’m just hanging out. I don’t have anything lined up, so I’m going to take a break for the whole summer,” she says. “Last summer I worked on Made of Honor and Trucker, so it’ll be nice to hang out with my girlfriends and see my family.”
Movies are subtile, but she’d love to emulate Laura Linney — on whom she has “a girl crush” — and incorporate it up between screen and stage.
“Ultimately, my revery is to chouse theater. When I do, it’ll be off-off-Broadway, in Jersey. It’s one of the benefits of living here, to be good to see incredible musicals and plays. I sort of think of L.A. as my place of work — I procreate in and get out — but New York is my home.”
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