On-trend tangerine lipstick? Check. Slim black dress that shows off her toned figure? Check. Sky-high, flesh-coloured Louboutin pumps? Check. On a recent spin through Toronto, the actress Michelle Monaghan had her presentation down pat. Friendly and well-behaved, she sat beautifully still in a hotel armchair, her legs stretching on for days, and offered the kind of enthusiastic but largely unrevealing answers that mark a real comer.
Since her breakthrough role on TV's Boston Public in 2002, Monaghan has been a sort of chorus girl with good taste - a spunky mid-level player who always makes the most of her moment with the star in well-chosen projects such as Mr. & Mrs. Smith, North Country and Gone Baby Gone. Or she's been a time-honoured stock character - the Stealth Hottie - in action/adventure pics ( Eagle Eye) and romantic comedies ( The Heartbreak Kid, Made of Honor). You know the type - the sane, stable, nice girl; the one the male lead ought to be with; the one he'll end up loving once he gets that other more glamorous, but crazy, girl out of his system. In other words, the brunette.
"I would say I'm stable, yeah," Monaghan said, narrowing her eyes. "And if I wasn't I probably wouldn't tell you otherwise."
She radiates the two qualities essential to Stealth Hotties, energetic warmth and tolerant humour. "Sure," these characters imply, "I'll go bungee jumping or pub crawling with him, and listen to his women problems, and give him great advice and a shapely shoulder to lean on, because one fine day he'll look up and see what was right in front of him all along."
It's a role Sandra Bullock played for years, until she bumped up to the big leagues. The vibe around Monaghan suggests she's ready to fill Bullock's old niche. She's even adopted a recent Bullock hairstyle, her "Screw you, Jesse" wall of bangs.
Source Code, which opened on Friday, could be the transitional movie the 35-year-old Monaghan needs. A big-budget, sci-fi-flavoured thriller, it was directed by Duncan Jones, who caught Hollywood's eye with his first feature, the trippy Moon (and the fact that he's David Bowie's son). It stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Colter Stevens, a flyboy who's participating in an experimental military operation.
Stevens plunges into the recorded brainwaves - the titular source code - of a train commuter who was killed in a terrorist bombing, and relives the last eight minutes of the commuter's life over and over, to obtain clues to ward off a second attack. Monaghan plays a fellow commuter. But her real role is to make Gyllenhaal (and the audience) fall for her while he keeps reliving the code.
It's not an easy task, given that she has to repeat the same lines each time. "Yeah, and usually you get to change your clothes from scene to scene, too," Monaghan said, laughing. "It was daunting. But then I got excited about the challenge of it. It's an interesting exercise for an actor, to try to nuance each eight minutes, to make it different and engaging."
To help, Monaghan and Gyllenhaal did a lot of off-camera improvising to try to "keep it fresh and crack each other up and breathe some life into it with dialogue that was not at all what we were supposed to say," she said. "Jake's so goofy and funny. It's a side I never knew of him; it doesn't come through in his films that much."
Between takes he distracted her with "all kinds of impressions," in particular one of a Québécois chef. "Jake's a real foodie, an amazing cook, and he would just talk about food in restaurants, but as this goofy Québécois chef, with the accent," Monaghan said. "He had the whole crew in stitches. I would love to see him in a big comedy."
She also created a private back story for her character, about how she'd been "meandering through life, not living to her fullest potential" until she struck up a conversation with a stranger on a train. "I just needed him to listen, basically," she said. "So for any man out there: Just listen, and women will be putty in your hands."
Monaghan grew up in Iowa with two older brothers who taught her to "hang with the boys" - a useful skill for actresses, who tend to work with more men than women. But she's also a "girl's girl" who's looking forward to shooting Better Living Through Chemistry in August with Jennifer Garner and Dame Judi Dench, and who spoke for jilted women everywhere when her actress character in Sofia Coppola's Somewhere slapped down her ex-lover (Steve Dorff), saying, "It wasn't even that good."
The role was tiny but indelible, a Monaghan specialty. "Honestly, I would do anything for Sofia Coppola, I would tie her shoes for her," she said. "She's such a dream, dream, dream. I loved when she pulled back [the camera]and you saw him standing on an apple box because I'm taller."
Maybe Monaghan's so sane because she didn't set out to be an actress. "I did it on a whim," she said. "I never had anything to compare it to, and I still don't know what it will be in 10 years. But I'm a big believer that everything comes to you for a reason, and however it happens it's organic."
She believed that enough to take two years off after giving birth in November, 2008, to her daughter, Willow Katherine, with her husband of five years, the Australian graphic designer Pete White.
Before she got into acting, Monaghan was a model - first for stores including Target and Montgomery Ward, to pay for her tuition as a journalism student at Columbia College Chicago, then full-time for four years, travelling to Europe and Asia. One final example of her stability: She has nothing but positive things to say about the experience.
"I got to travel all over the world," she said. "It afforded me the opportunity to go to college. I learned a lot about myself. It gave me a great deal of confidence." (She may literally be the only person to have ever said that.)
"I got a very thick skin at a young age," she continued. "So when I made the transition into acting at 25 it helped me tremendously. I thought, 'Okay, nobody can say anything to me that's going to kill me.' "
So, basically, she's the sanest person wherever she goes? Monaghan laughed. "Maybe one of," she said.